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New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

129 points by hourislate 9y ago

bmcusick 9y ago
$0.33 per shirt, anywhere in the world, is nearly as cheap as the cheapest sweatshop markets. I expect most commentary will look at this using a US vs China thing, but I'm more worried about SE Asia and Africa. They need to climb up the development ladder that China's already 1/2-way up. Say what you will about clothing and sneaker sweatshops, but they were a tried and tested method for building up the basics of an industrial economy. South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong wouldn't have gotten to where they are today as quickly without them. How will Kenya develop?
- Overtonwindow 9y ago
  What do you think will be the industry that shifts from China to SE Asia and Africa? I feel like clothing is the likeliest because of it's relative simplicity, compared to other things.
- dannysu 9y ago
  Not sure how accurate. I think clothing has already moved away from China. I have shirts made in Bangladesh. And according to [1], workers get paid $0.12 per shirt. Like you said, $0.33 vs $0.12 is super close it seems. [1]: http://www.ecouterre.com/infographic-how-much-does-that-14-t-shirt-really-cost/
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    The article says the cost in Bangladesh is 22 cents. That is surely close enough, after taking into account transport and lead time, that factories in Bangladesh should be worried.
    - HillaryBriss 9y ago
      how much will the human labor cost per shirt be once these automatic t-shirt machines are moved to Bangladesh?
      - bmcusick 9y ago
        Robot production lines need robot technicians to support them. I doubt you'll find many of those in Bangladesh any time soon.
        HillaryBriss 9y ago
        eventually though. there are, no doubt, some very skillful, very resourceful sewing machine repair techs there. i guess that time window is how long the automatic t-shirt making business remains viable in the US.
        photojosh 9y ago
        IIRC most of the world's hard drives are made in Thailand, not too far away. They found them somewhere. :) And one robot replaces 17 workers, it's probably around 1 robot tech to support 10-20 machines. According to these stats [1], in Bangladesh there's 4800 factories with around 725 workers on average. So that would be 40 machines with one worker each to supervise and 3-4 robot techs. 5 people to replace 725! [1] http://www.waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh http://www.waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh
      - joeyo 9y ago
        Why will the machines need to be located in Bangladesh? Cheaper repairmen?
        HillaryBriss 9y ago
        i was just thinking like some business owner might: let's try to lower costs in every possible way, including labor.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  I don't see this as bad. Being able to manufacture simple things just increases how complex things can be for a certain cost. CNC and automated process control isn't killing Asian metalworking.
  - bmcusick 9y ago
    Economies need to meet a certain level of development in order to "move up the value chain" rather than just get left behind. I'm confident China has that. I'd be worried about Indonesia or Kenya.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Kenya hasn't developed yet, why do we think it will? Putting it another way, Kenya's development has not been held back by lack of sweatshops but by corrupt government and misguided go-gooderism.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    > by lack of sweatshops but by corrupt government I think this is a false contrast. Stable government and reliable infrastructure are the standard requirements for building factories (sweatshop or otherwise) in a country. So a lack of industrialization is frequently a consequence of bad governance. Notably, corruption itself isn't an issue. China, for instance, has plenty of corrupt and autocratic governance. But it has predictable, tolerable corruption and a basically-stable political structure, however the specifics may change. What's important is that the situation was predictable; everyone was willing to skim a percentage and leave the basic structures of government intact. If investors were worried that the government might take 100% of an investment, or fall completely, the situation would look pretty different.
    - pm90 9y ago
      Excellent point. If you look at China, they took a long time to get to a state where they could start developing reliably. Basically after the fall of the Monarchy, there were revolution after revolution, until the Communist takeover. Even after, it took much later, until the rise of Deng Xiaoping, for development to actually take place. By that time, the State had effectively established itself as the Supreme political power (albeit a non-democratic one) which lead to the stability that allowed massive industrialization to take place rapidly, often with assistance from the State.
  - sekou 9y ago
    While growth has slowed in recent years, 6 of the world's 10 fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2010 (https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_chart https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_cha... ). While Kenya isn't included among those countries it has also shown robust growth. It may be that this growth is unfairly geared toward the wealthiest Africans but I think you'd find that the life of the average Kenyan has improved markedly in the last 20 years.
- otakucode 9y ago
  Tech is cheap and ubiquitous. Perhaps people in SE Asia and Africa might want to invest in a T-shirt sewing robot and an Internet connection such that they can run absolute circles around every major developed-world company by keeping their overhead low. Those multi-hundred-million-dollar CEOs from those American (or Chinese) companies are a tremendous drain. And that's not even to mention their absurd gigantic office complexes which aggressively destroy value at every turn...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    That requires infrastructure. Here's the thing though: if you can do it dirt cheap overseas and cut out labour, then you can do it dirt cheap pretty much anywhere. Offshoring really gets done to reduce costs via cheaper wages. If you take out the wages, then offshoring doesn't look as good as it once was. The issue is that white collar work is now the stuff that gets offshored. But then I see the absolute dire service many outsourced companies provide and I often wonder how much the business loses because of it.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Lots of stuff are made in China due to proximity to resources, not just cheap labor. T-shirts don't qualify, though - the US is actually the largest cotton producer.
      - chris_wot 9y ago
        In that case, Australia should soon have a large manufacturing base.
- snrplfth 9y ago
  You could say that about basically every labour-saving device though. Tractors, earth-moving equipment, container ships, whatever. And even textiles are almost wholly automated now - lots of textiles are grown or spun, woven, dyed and printed almost entirely by automated machines - robots, in effect. Final assembly is in many cases the first time a given piece of textile has been touched by human hands. So why is the automation of this final step going to be the thing that prevents countries from climbing the "development ladder"? When cellphones became affordable, it didn't mean that countries without decent landline networks couldn't "move up the ladder". They just jumped straight to the more advanced technology. If higher-productivity technologies are available, and are cheaper than using scarce human labour, then you use it. More productivity is not somehow a bad thing.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    I'm not convinced this point carries. Sure, "lump of labor" is a fallacy, more productivity is not likely to drive massive unemployment. But that doesn't mean all labor is interchangeably easy in all environments. Competition is still possible. Early tractors didn't do much for underdeveloped nations. Mainframe computers didn't either. The default state of capital-intensive technology is to improve productivity, but not to bring capital and work into underdeveloped nations. Whatever benefits accrue there are the diffuse rewards of expanding global production. The economic boom in China, Taiwan, etc was something vastly more specific than "rising labor productivity". Container ships, telecommunications, (Western labor laws,) and efficient but labor-intensive production came together to make offshoring incredibly profitable. The boom wasn't just rising productivity, it was a confluence of incentives that made production in certain countries much more attractive than others. We didn't just make more things, we closed factories in the West and reopened them in China. If the next wave of productivity gains is high-capital, high-tech, low-labor, we'll probably see the reverse happen. People will engage in production where they can get extremely stable infrastructure (including internet), skilled labor, and precision parts. Factories in countries with cheap labor but unreliable power and internet might well close in favor of more production in countries like South Korea or even America. That won't be the end of the world, productivity will still rise, but it might end the specific forces that have caused so much growth via mass production.
- Fezzik 9y ago
  The Economist just had a great article about the process of moving a poor country up the ladder, focusing on Bangladesh. I thought it was a good read, and it touches on the roll of textile manufacturing and the related infrastructure that helps boost an economy. https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-has-dysfunctional-politics-and-stunted-private-sector-yet-it-has-been-surprisingly https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-...
- mankash666 9y ago
  Kenya will develop by investing in it's people's education and economy. Sweatshop as a vehicle of development is like "war for peace"
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Add this to the story about Nike funding and now deploying robots as well, and the economic impact could be really huge. It may help the West though...
- nols 9y ago
  That $0.33 is cost of human labor, the article doesn't mention how much the technology contributes to the cost of the clothing.
  - puranjay 9y ago
    More importantly, what will you save on shipping and how much more could you make by marking the t-shirt up as "made in America"? What are the long-term brand benefits of being American-made?
- rtpg 9y ago
  considering the low price of the shirts, how do you cover the capital costs of the robots? I'm having a hard time imagining the robots putting out 6 digits-worth of shirts per robot to cover the costs?
  - amelius 9y ago
    Perhaps they can focus on customization, and sell more expensive shirts?
- vorotato 9y ago
  Well we could react to abundance in a non-imperialist way...
chrisreichel 9y ago
Why should I be surprised. That's been happening since 1700´s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution] Perhaps that will be the way the most developed Countries will return some of the production lines to them.
- amaranth 9y ago
  Even aside from the argument about production never actually leaving developed countries (only the non-automatable stuff left, the rest is growing faster than ever) this won't really have much benefit. If people in your country are buying the shirts these companies make there is already tax being taken for them and it's not like they'll add enough jobs to even notice, that's the whole point.
- RobertoG 9y ago
  "Perhaps that will be the way the most developed Countries will return some of the production lines to them" Why do you care about that? ecology? It's not like if it's going to translate in jobs.
  - jicks 9y ago
    Less transportation required, which should be cheaper and better for the environment.
  - mantas 9y ago
    Someone would have to build and manage factories. Would need a night guard to feed the guard dogs too :)
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  The mechanical knitting machine was invented in 1589. The Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters was incorporated in 1657 London. Some framework knitters were among the Luddites, who resisted the transition to factories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting#Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting#Industrial...
Overtonwindow 9y ago
I can't quite decide which will be the tipping point for robots replacing humans: Agriculture, food service, or garments. The first seems ripe (no pun intended) for disruption but apparently often requires human skill to identify products. The second seems more likely, as fast food is mostly automated with some human intervention; coupled with self-checkout technology in any language, and it might work. Garments, however, I'm not sure that's the industry. Certainly replacing 17 workers with a single robot (costs aside) seems like a good start, but this also seems like an industry that could uproot and go somewhere else. From America, to China, to Southeast Asia, Africa, and beyond, to wherever human capital can be had for less.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  I recently came across this video of a color sensing tomato sorting machine. https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk Really shifted my mental ranking of where agricultural processing was at.
  - Danihan 9y ago
    Why? Seems pretty basic and simplistic. I'm more impressed by the various types of field harvesters
  - deedub 9y ago
    About 20 years ago (Holy shit!) I worked in a potato processing facility. They had multiple belts all about 8' wide that ran through a machine that scanned 100s / 1000's of dehydrated potato flakes for quality every second and could hit a specific flake with a burst of air to blow it off one line and into another. 20 yrs ago. I believe they went under / were bought up by a more modern company 5 or so yrs ago.
- bmcusick 9y ago
  All three over the next 10 years. Agriculture: Computer vision is improving really fast. The technology that Amazon is developing for picking products at its warehouses will also allow them to pick apples. Food Service: The real killer app here is that special-purpose automated kitchens (like the ones that produce only fresh hamburgers) will combine with drone and self-driving car delivery to make meal deliver 1/4 the price of restaurants today. Garments: The technology in this article means that production in the EU/USA will cost about the same as Indonesia or Kenya, and the EU/USA labor pool will have more of the high-skill technicians you need to service the robots. Combined with shorter supply chains and faster time to market and you'll see garment manufacturing becoming "local but automated" in most markets. Depending on the supply of "sewbot technicians" the USA might even start exporting clothing to Latin America or wherever.
dannysu 9y ago
This reminds me about when Bill Gates make that comment saying that raising the minimal wage could make the cost trade-off of investing in automation worthwhile [1]. On one hand, people need living wages. But on the other hand, I think we're witnessing what Bill Gates is talking about here. What's the solution? Gates has floated the idea of taxing robots. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-away-jobs-2014-3
- lsd5you 9y ago
  He is hardly the first person to make that observation - or even the first noteworthy person. This is a debate as old as economics.
- paulsutter 9y ago
  But what's a robot? Is a 3D printer a robot? (it has moving parts and builds things) is the Google Adwords code a robot? (it sure makes a lot of money) a quant hedge fund? Do you tax all computers by cost or value produced? Seems simpler to tax companies for making money. EDIT: We won't need middle-manager bots that show each other powerpoints all day. What "robot" would get taxed for the disappearance of that function?
  - goodJobWalrus 9y ago
    In this context, I think he really talks about taxing capital (or capital investments that displace workers).
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    >Seems simpler to tax companies for making money. Only if that money makes its way back to the people who would otherwise have been employed because of the robot tax.
- adventured 9y ago
  Bill Gates, as noted in your linked article, is against aggressively raising the minimum wage. As with Warren Buffett, he is in favor of raising the income tax credit rather than the minimum wage. It's a radically better solution for improving wages in the near-term. A too-high minimum wage artificially cuts off the supply of who a business can hire, based on what someone's labor is worth to said business (they have to be able to afford the cost of the labor). An increased income tax credit, paid for via higher taxes on the top ~1/3 income bracket, avoids the problem of pricing low skilled labor out of the market and enables businesses to hire a lot more people whose labor isn't yet worth eg $10 or $15 / hour. Taxing productivity is an extraordinarily bad idea. It's up there with taxing every search result or trying to slow down computing productivity by abusively taxing cloud computing or smartphone & PC usage.
amrrs 9y ago
Should we need a basic standard of what can be called Robots? We're in an age of journalism where almost anything that can do what humans do (Guess, had calculator been invented in this age,'This automated Robot can do as many calculation as 3 Accountants' would have been a viral article) is called a Robot. But what we forget is that it's always been the case all this while, Consider a Toll collection booth with humans in it and then an RFID based automated system, I don't remember if those got this kind of attention as Toll Collecting Robots.
- abakker 9y ago
  Don't even get me started on "Software Robots", aka RPA (Robotic process automation). Yikes what a misuse of terminology.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  What do you think should be called a robot? From watching the video, this seems like a scaled down version of the sort of industrial robot systems you'd see in other manufacturing fields (albeit meant for sewing, and not assembling cars or other things).
- ksk 9y ago
  They were calling a NAS a "data robot" 10 years ago ! (drobo)
hex1848 9y ago
Friendly reminder that building a wall isn't going to keep blue collar jobs around. Automation is going to kill them much quicker than immigrants will.
- mantas 9y ago
  .. and no amount of cheap immigrant labour won't stop automation. Which is why the less immigrants, the better. Less people kicked out of jobs == easier to implement UBI or similar system.
  - koops 9y ago
    Fewer.
    - mantas 9y ago
      Yes, führer
      - dang 9y ago
        First, this kind of post will get you banned from HN if you do it repeatedly, so please don't. Second, would you please not use HN for political or ideological battle? You appear to have been doing that repeatedly and it's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        mantas 9y ago
        The top level comment I replied to went on the political discourse and I just carried on from there. Did he get a warning as well? Personally I'd be happy to have less political HN. But as long as there're top level political comments.. It's too hard to resist :) I believe mods could easily mega-downvote such comments. Yet particular comment I replied to seem to be upvoted? As for my later comment, are jokes not allowed on HN anymore? I got grammar-nazi'd, I replied back with a matching joke.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Sylphine 9y ago
Oh, boy, another series of layoffs and the rich getting richer. "But my free market!!" Means squat when the elite hoards all the goods and the barriers to entry are extremely high.
- 2017Dude 9y ago
  So... Communism? 100$ shirts? Sweatshops? Ludditism? Also there is no free market anymore - have you seen all the punitive economic sanctions recently.
alex- 9y ago
> "...can make as many shirts per hour as about 17 humans" Surprised they are looking at it per hour. Presumably the automation could run for close to 24 hours a day, whereas the human workforce could not. So each of these units could replace 51 workers? (3 rotations of 17 workers each doing 8 hours a day). That's before considering the human workforce generally requires 2 days a week off.
aussieguy123 9y ago
$0.33 for the robot to produce the shirt vs $0.20 or so for the sweatshop worker in bangladesh. Take into account the extra shipping costs from bangladesh and it might actually be cheaper
- r0ze-at-hn 9y ago
  Agreed, and you are also forgetting about speed. This robot can produce t-shirts that can be delivered to customers next day. Doesn't matter how cheep bangladesh might be, they can't match that speed. This opens up opportunities for sales that were impossible before. If you need 100 shirts tomorrow you are willing to pay more so it has even larger margins.

129 points by hourislate 9y ago

$0.33 per shirt, anywhere in the world, is nearly as cheap as the cheapest sweatshop markets. I expect most commentary will look at this using a US vs China thing, but I'm more worried about SE Asia and Africa. They need to climb up the development ladder that China's already 1/2-way up. Say what you will about clothing and sneaker sweatshops, but they were a tried and tested method for building up the basics of an industrial economy. South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong wouldn't have gotten to where they are today as quickly without them. How will Kenya develop?

Overtonwindow 9y ago
What do you think will be the industry that shifts from China to SE Asia and Africa? I feel like clothing is the likeliest because of it's relative simplicity, compared to other things.
dannysu 9y ago
Not sure how accurate. I think clothing has already moved away from China. I have shirts made in Bangladesh. And according to [1], workers get paid $0.12 per shirt. Like you said, $0.33 vs $0.12 is super close it seems. [1]: http://www.ecouterre.com/infographic-how-much-does-that-14-t-shirt-really-cost/
- Symbiote 9y ago
  The article says the cost in Bangladesh is 22 cents. That is surely close enough, after taking into account transport and lead time, that factories in Bangladesh should be worried.
  - HillaryBriss 9y ago
    how much will the human labor cost per shirt be once these automatic t-shirt machines are moved to Bangladesh?
    - bmcusick 9y ago
      Robot production lines need robot technicians to support them. I doubt you'll find many of those in Bangladesh any time soon.
      - HillaryBriss 9y ago
        eventually though. there are, no doubt, some very skillful, very resourceful sewing machine repair techs there. i guess that time window is how long the automatic t-shirt making business remains viable in the US.
      - photojosh 9y ago
        IIRC most of the world's hard drives are made in Thailand, not too far away. They found them somewhere. :) And one robot replaces 17 workers, it's probably around 1 robot tech to support 10-20 machines. According to these stats [1], in Bangladesh there's 4800 factories with around 725 workers on average. So that would be 40 machines with one worker each to supervise and 3-4 robot techs. 5 people to replace 725! [1] http://www.waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh http://www.waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh
    - joeyo 9y ago
      Why will the machines need to be located in Bangladesh? Cheaper repairmen?
      - HillaryBriss 9y ago
        i was just thinking like some business owner might: let's try to lower costs in every possible way, including labor.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
I don't see this as bad. Being able to manufacture simple things just increases how complex things can be for a certain cost. CNC and automated process control isn't killing Asian metalworking.
- bmcusick 9y ago
  Economies need to meet a certain level of development in order to "move up the value chain" rather than just get left behind. I'm confident China has that. I'd be worried about Indonesia or Kenya.
ams6110 9y ago
Kenya hasn't developed yet, why do we think it will? Putting it another way, Kenya's development has not been held back by lack of sweatshops but by corrupt government and misguided go-gooderism.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > by lack of sweatshops but by corrupt government I think this is a false contrast. Stable government and reliable infrastructure are the standard requirements for building factories (sweatshop or otherwise) in a country. So a lack of industrialization is frequently a consequence of bad governance. Notably, corruption itself isn't an issue. China, for instance, has plenty of corrupt and autocratic governance. But it has predictable, tolerable corruption and a basically-stable political structure, however the specifics may change. What's important is that the situation was predictable; everyone was willing to skim a percentage and leave the basic structures of government intact. If investors were worried that the government might take 100% of an investment, or fall completely, the situation would look pretty different.
  - pm90 9y ago
    Excellent point. If you look at China, they took a long time to get to a state where they could start developing reliably. Basically after the fall of the Monarchy, there were revolution after revolution, until the Communist takeover. Even after, it took much later, until the rise of Deng Xiaoping, for development to actually take place. By that time, the State had effectively established itself as the Supreme political power (albeit a non-democratic one) which lead to the stability that allowed massive industrialization to take place rapidly, often with assistance from the State.
- sekou 9y ago
  While growth has slowed in recent years, 6 of the world's 10 fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2010 (https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_chart https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_cha... ). While Kenya isn't included among those countries it has also shown robust growth. It may be that this growth is unfairly geared toward the wealthiest Africans but I think you'd find that the life of the average Kenyan has improved markedly in the last 20 years.
otakucode 9y ago
Tech is cheap and ubiquitous. Perhaps people in SE Asia and Africa might want to invest in a T-shirt sewing robot and an Internet connection such that they can run absolute circles around every major developed-world company by keeping their overhead low. Those multi-hundred-million-dollar CEOs from those American (or Chinese) companies are a tremendous drain. And that's not even to mention their absurd gigantic office complexes which aggressively destroy value at every turn...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chris_wot 9y ago
  That requires infrastructure. Here's the thing though: if you can do it dirt cheap overseas and cut out labour, then you can do it dirt cheap pretty much anywhere. Offshoring really gets done to reduce costs via cheaper wages. If you take out the wages, then offshoring doesn't look as good as it once was. The issue is that white collar work is now the stuff that gets offshored. But then I see the absolute dire service many outsourced companies provide and I often wonder how much the business loses because of it.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Lots of stuff are made in China due to proximity to resources, not just cheap labor. T-shirts don't qualify, though - the US is actually the largest cotton producer.
    - chris_wot 9y ago
      In that case, Australia should soon have a large manufacturing base.
snrplfth 9y ago
You could say that about basically every labour-saving device though. Tractors, earth-moving equipment, container ships, whatever. And even textiles are almost wholly automated now - lots of textiles are grown or spun, woven, dyed and printed almost entirely by automated machines - robots, in effect. Final assembly is in many cases the first time a given piece of textile has been touched by human hands. So why is the automation of this final step going to be the thing that prevents countries from climbing the "development ladder"? When cellphones became affordable, it didn't mean that countries without decent landline networks couldn't "move up the ladder". They just jumped straight to the more advanced technology. If higher-productivity technologies are available, and are cheaper than using scarce human labour, then you use it. More productivity is not somehow a bad thing.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I'm not convinced this point carries. Sure, "lump of labor" is a fallacy, more productivity is not likely to drive massive unemployment. But that doesn't mean all labor is interchangeably easy in all environments. Competition is still possible. Early tractors didn't do much for underdeveloped nations. Mainframe computers didn't either. The default state of capital-intensive technology is to improve productivity, but not to bring capital and work into underdeveloped nations. Whatever benefits accrue there are the diffuse rewards of expanding global production. The economic boom in China, Taiwan, etc was something vastly more specific than "rising labor productivity". Container ships, telecommunications, (Western labor laws,) and efficient but labor-intensive production came together to make offshoring incredibly profitable. The boom wasn't just rising productivity, it was a confluence of incentives that made production in certain countries much more attractive than others. We didn't just make more things, we closed factories in the West and reopened them in China. If the next wave of productivity gains is high-capital, high-tech, low-labor, we'll probably see the reverse happen. People will engage in production where they can get extremely stable infrastructure (including internet), skilled labor, and precision parts. Factories in countries with cheap labor but unreliable power and internet might well close in favor of more production in countries like South Korea or even America. That won't be the end of the world, productivity will still rise, but it might end the specific forces that have caused so much growth via mass production.
Fezzik 9y ago
The Economist just had a great article about the process of moving a poor country up the ladder, focusing on Bangladesh. I thought it was a good read, and it touches on the roll of textile manufacturing and the related infrastructure that helps boost an economy. https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-has-dysfunctional-politics-and-stunted-private-sector-yet-it-has-been-surprisingly https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-...
mankash666 9y ago
Kenya will develop by investing in it's people's education and economy. Sweatshop as a vehicle of development is like "war for peace"
QAPereo 9y ago
Add this to the story about Nike funding and now deploying robots as well, and the economic impact could be really huge. It may help the West though...
nols 9y ago
That $0.33 is cost of human labor, the article doesn't mention how much the technology contributes to the cost of the clothing.
- puranjay 9y ago
  More importantly, what will you save on shipping and how much more could you make by marking the t-shirt up as "made in America"? What are the long-term brand benefits of being American-made?
rtpg 9y ago
considering the low price of the shirts, how do you cover the capital costs of the robots? I'm having a hard time imagining the robots putting out 6 digits-worth of shirts per robot to cover the costs?
- amelius 9y ago
  Perhaps they can focus on customization, and sell more expensive shirts?
vorotato 9y ago
Well we could react to abundance in a non-imperialist way...

chrisreichel 9y ago

Why should I be surprised. That's been happening since 1700´s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution] Perhaps that will be the way the most developed Countries will return some of the production lines to them.

amaranth 9y ago
Even aside from the argument about production never actually leaving developed countries (only the non-automatable stuff left, the rest is growing faster than ever) this won't really have much benefit. If people in your country are buying the shirts these companies make there is already tax being taken for them and it's not like they'll add enough jobs to even notice, that's the whole point.
RobertoG 9y ago
"Perhaps that will be the way the most developed Countries will return some of the production lines to them" Why do you care about that? ecology? It's not like if it's going to translate in jobs.
- jicks 9y ago
  Less transportation required, which should be cheaper and better for the environment.
- mantas 9y ago
  Someone would have to build and manage factories. Would need a night guard to feed the guard dogs too :)
PeachPlum 9y ago
The mechanical knitting machine was invented in 1589. The Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters was incorporated in 1657 London. Some framework knitters were among the Luddites, who resisted the transition to factories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting#Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting#Industrial...

Overtonwindow 9y ago

I can't quite decide which will be the tipping point for robots replacing humans: Agriculture, food service, or garments. The first seems ripe (no pun intended) for disruption but apparently often requires human skill to identify products. The second seems more likely, as fast food is mostly automated with some human intervention; coupled with self-checkout technology in any language, and it might work. Garments, however, I'm not sure that's the industry. Certainly replacing 17 workers with a single robot (costs aside) seems like a good start, but this also seems like an industry that could uproot and go somewhere else. From America, to China, to Southeast Asia, Africa, and beyond, to wherever human capital can be had for less.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago
I recently came across this video of a color sensing tomato sorting machine. https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk Really shifted my mental ranking of where agricultural processing was at.
- Danihan 9y ago
  Why? Seems pretty basic and simplistic. I'm more impressed by the various types of field harvesters
- deedub 9y ago
  About 20 years ago (Holy shit!) I worked in a potato processing facility. They had multiple belts all about 8' wide that ran through a machine that scanned 100s / 1000's of dehydrated potato flakes for quality every second and could hit a specific flake with a burst of air to blow it off one line and into another. 20 yrs ago. I believe they went under / were bought up by a more modern company 5 or so yrs ago.
bmcusick 9y ago
All three over the next 10 years. Agriculture: Computer vision is improving really fast. The technology that Amazon is developing for picking products at its warehouses will also allow them to pick apples. Food Service: The real killer app here is that special-purpose automated kitchens (like the ones that produce only fresh hamburgers) will combine with drone and self-driving car delivery to make meal deliver 1/4 the price of restaurants today. Garments: The technology in this article means that production in the EU/USA will cost about the same as Indonesia or Kenya, and the EU/USA labor pool will have more of the high-skill technicians you need to service the robots. Combined with shorter supply chains and faster time to market and you'll see garment manufacturing becoming "local but automated" in most markets. Depending on the supply of "sewbot technicians" the USA might even start exporting clothing to Latin America or wherever.

dannysu 9y ago

This reminds me about when Bill Gates make that comment saying that raising the minimal wage could make the cost trade-off of investing in automation worthwhile [1]. On one hand, people need living wages. But on the other hand, I think we're witnessing what Bill Gates is talking about here. What's the solution? Gates has floated the idea of taxing robots. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-away-jobs-2014-3

lsd5you 9y ago
He is hardly the first person to make that observation - or even the first noteworthy person. This is a debate as old as economics.
paulsutter 9y ago
But what's a robot? Is a 3D printer a robot? (it has moving parts and builds things) is the Google Adwords code a robot? (it sure makes a lot of money) a quant hedge fund? Do you tax all computers by cost or value produced? Seems simpler to tax companies for making money. EDIT: We won't need middle-manager bots that show each other powerpoints all day. What "robot" would get taxed for the disappearance of that function?
- goodJobWalrus 9y ago
  In this context, I think he really talks about taxing capital (or capital investments that displace workers).
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  >Seems simpler to tax companies for making money. Only if that money makes its way back to the people who would otherwise have been employed because of the robot tax.
adventured 9y ago
Bill Gates, as noted in your linked article, is against aggressively raising the minimum wage. As with Warren Buffett, he is in favor of raising the income tax credit rather than the minimum wage. It's a radically better solution for improving wages in the near-term. A too-high minimum wage artificially cuts off the supply of who a business can hire, based on what someone's labor is worth to said business (they have to be able to afford the cost of the labor). An increased income tax credit, paid for via higher taxes on the top ~1/3 income bracket, avoids the problem of pricing low skilled labor out of the market and enables businesses to hire a lot more people whose labor isn't yet worth eg $10 or $15 / hour. Taxing productivity is an extraordinarily bad idea. It's up there with taxing every search result or trying to slow down computing productivity by abusively taxing cloud computing or smartphone & PC usage.

amrrs 9y ago

Should we need a basic standard of what can be called Robots? We're in an age of journalism where almost anything that can do what humans do (Guess, had calculator been invented in this age,'This automated Robot can do as many calculation as 3 Accountants' would have been a viral article) is called a Robot. But what we forget is that it's always been the case all this while, Consider a Toll collection booth with humans in it and then an RFID based automated system, I don't remember if those got this kind of attention as Toll Collecting Robots.

abakker 9y ago
Don't even get me started on "Software Robots", aka RPA (Robotic process automation). Yikes what a misuse of terminology.
Jtsummers 9y ago
What do you think should be called a robot? From watching the video, this seems like a scaled down version of the sort of industrial robot systems you'd see in other manufacturing fields (albeit meant for sewing, and not assembling cars or other things).
ksk 9y ago
They were calling a NAS a "data robot" 10 years ago ! (drobo)

hex1848 9y ago

Friendly reminder that building a wall isn't going to keep blue collar jobs around. Automation is going to kill them much quicker than immigrants will.

mantas 9y ago
.. and no amount of cheap immigrant labour won't stop automation. Which is why the less immigrants, the better. Less people kicked out of jobs == easier to implement UBI or similar system.
- koops 9y ago
  Fewer.
  - mantas 9y ago
    Yes, führer
    - dang 9y ago
      First, this kind of post will get you banned from HN if you do it repeatedly, so please don't. Second, would you please not use HN for political or ideological battle? You appear to have been doing that repeatedly and it's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - mantas 9y ago
        The top level comment I replied to went on the political discourse and I just carried on from there. Did he get a warning as well? Personally I'd be happy to have less political HN. But as long as there're top level political comments.. It's too hard to resist :) I believe mods could easily mega-downvote such comments. Yet particular comment I replied to seem to be upvoted? As for my later comment, are jokes not allowed on HN anymore? I got grammar-nazi'd, I replied back with a matching joke.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Sylphine 9y ago

Oh, boy, another series of layoffs and the rich getting richer. "But my free market!!" Means squat when the elite hoards all the goods and the barriers to entry are extremely high.

2017Dude 9y ago
So... Communism? 100$ shirts? Sweatshops? Ludditism? Also there is no free market anymore - have you seen all the punitive economic sanctions recently.

alex- 9y ago

> "...can make as many shirts per hour as about 17 humans" Surprised they are looking at it per hour. Presumably the automation could run for close to 24 hours a day, whereas the human workforce could not. So each of these units could replace 51 workers? (3 rotations of 17 workers each doing 8 hours a day). That's before considering the human workforce generally requires 2 days a week off.

aussieguy123 9y ago

$0.33 for the robot to produce the shirt vs $0.20 or so for the sweatshop worker in bangladesh. Take into account the extra shipping costs from bangladesh and it might actually be cheaper

r0ze-at-hn 9y ago
Agreed, and you are also forgetting about speed. This robot can produce t-shirts that can be delivered to customers next day. Doesn't matter how cheep bangladesh might be, they can't match that speed. This opens up opportunities for sales that were impossible before. If you need 100 shirts tomorrow you are willing to pay more so it has even larger margins.