New T-Shirt Sewing Robot Can Make As Many Shirts Per Hour As 17 Factory Workers (qz.com) 409
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: In 2015, after years of research, SoftWear Automation introduced LOWRY, a sewing robot, or sewbot, that uses machine vision to spot and adjust to distortions in the fabric. Though initially only able to make simple products, such as bath mats, the technology is now advanced enough to make whole t-shirts and much of a pair of jeans. According to the company, it also does it far faster than a human sewing line. SoftWear Automation's big selling point is that one of its robotic sewing lines can replace a conventional line of 10 workers and produce about 1,142 t-shirts in an eight-hour period, compared to just 669 for the human sewing line. Another way to look at it is that the robot, working under the guidance of a single human handler, can make as many shirts per hour as about 17 humans. The company has emerged as a leader among those trying to automate sewing, drawing the interest of businesses that make home goods and of course clothing manufacturers, including Tianyuan Garments Company, a Chinese firm that produces for brands such as Adidas and Armani. Tianyuan Garments has invested $20 million in a 100,000-square foot factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, planned to open in 2018. The factory will be staffed with 21 robotic production lines supplied by SoftWear Automation, and will be capable of making 1.2 million t-shirts a year.
Amazing! (Score:5, Funny)
So that's like... a few dozen jobs at the most? Surely with the production costs going down the shirts will be sold at lower prices, right?
US production (Score:5, Interesting)
US production per worker is currently about $58,000 [google.com], and seems to be going up by $10,000 per decade.
That's per capita, meaning "per person". If the per-capita output were distributed equally to every man, woman, and child everyone would have about $58.000 to spend. Each year. Including kids and babies. And they could do it again next year.
This will only go up as AI and automation take over. A huge number of driving jobs will be taken over by self-driving vehicles in the next decade (already happening with long-haul trucks), and AI and robotics will take over ever more of the production, working 24/7 and making more goods, more cheaply, and faster than humans.
We need to transition away from the current economic system real soon, or suffer massive riots and the downfall of our culture as unemployed people riot and take it down for us.
We need a way to spread the wealth out a little more evenly. UBI is one way, and we're getting really close to the point where UBI will be cheaper than the cost of government assistance plus the lost cost of higher crime and prison for the poor.
Perhaps taxing the robots and using the money to fund the rest of UBI would work.
We could also lower the SS retirement age, or go to a 4-day work week. Lots of options, many would work or could be made to work.
But we have to start transitioning just about now, or risk the downfall of our culture.
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I would rather actually fund education so more people would be qualified for work beyond being a meat-part in a machine, doing the same thing over and over again for days, months, years.
Good idea, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
I would rather actually fund education so more people would be qualified for work beyond being a meat-part in a machine, doing the same thing over and over again for days, months, years.
That was a good idea in previous decades.
Currently the number of jobs is shrinking, while the workforce is not [google.com](*). it's already causing a lot of stress in our society, and probably one reason for the recent election results.
The system was able to soak up some of the excess - the meme of children living with their parents until well into adulthood is one result - but it's starting to show signs of saturation. The burgeoning debt of education versus finding a job, currently being a topic of concern, is one bit of evidence.
Training and education are certainly important, but it doesn't address the problem. It'll only result in educated unemployed.
We need a way to support non-workers in our society, and pretty quick.
(*) Roughly speaking, population is remaining steady. Meanwhile, productivity keeps rising.
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Currently the number of jobs is shrinking
Bullcrap. Productivity growth is stagnant [qz.com] and job losses to automation are mostly not happening. The easy gains in automation of manufacturing are mostly over, and service jobs are proving much harder to automate.
It is fun to hypothesize about robots taking over, and how society is going to adapt to post-scarcity, but that is theoretical conjecture, and not based on the reality of what is actually happening today. The truth is that improvements in automation are happening far too slowly to produce the higher living standards that people have come to expect.
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is fun to hypothesize about robots taking over, and how society is going to adapt to post-scarcity, but that is theoretical conjecture, and not based on the reality of what is actually happening today.
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
Human beings, unlike some other living creatures on Earth, are not evolved and adapted to any specific environment. If the environment changes, we'll pick up our marbles and go play somewhere else. The history of humanity is a series of great disruptions and changes . . . sure, a lot of folks die prematurely along the way, but the vast majority seems to just muddle on.
Human beings are like toenail fungus . . . very difficult to get rid of completely.
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Automation is gonna be kinda like global warming, short term signs are so subtle, that it's easy to miss the long term trend but bam! It will hit someday. The U3 graph going back to 1950s does show a trend where the peaks of unemployment would be the valleys now:
https://www.economicgreenfield.com/2014/07/03/u-3-and-u-6-unemployment-rate-long-term-reference-charts-as-of-july-3-2014/
Anyway, unlike what economics teaches, I think humans do have limited wants and needs and that's the problem. Our limit is connected to our (inability) to multitask and our limited attention span. For example, when I'm really into a good book, or movie, unlimited wants and needs can't kick in and say I need 10 good songs or movies right that minute. Same with food for most people.
I mention this because that's how people usually argue out of this automation problem. Something like, "oh yeah, all the carriage makers just moved onto cars!"
You see, that's true but so many of our industries are tied to solving old wants and needs (cars - age old point A to B problem), or this article about clothes, etc.
What happens when industry effectively solves the problem so that no human can compete, like sewing clothing here... will every sewing machine operator become a fashion designer? While I'm sure like printing in the past, this tech will open doors to more designers, it won't be any fraction to recover the lost jobs. Just like we can't have a poet and artist based economy (from products to services).
Now, it may not happen this decade, or century even, but if progress continues, I'm sure enough there will be a point when mundane human wants are effectively satisfied and the people left unemployed will not be remotely equipped to handle any other type of need or want no matter their education.
The real question is how to handle that transition period where employment needs to keep going... but not everyone (or even half) can be employed.
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
And even if our want was unlimited, our funds are not. And no matter how much someone wants (or even needs) something, if he cannot afford it, no sale will happen.
If we want to fix our economy, we need more money on the demand side. The supply side is adequately funded. Actually, overfunded. Interest is bordering on becoming negative and STILL nobody can invest in something worthwhile.
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
No people with jobs => no consumers => no market.
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps the stock market it at record highs _because_ interest is approaching negative rates? If you can't put your savings in the bank that money has to be invested somewhere. More investors chasing the same shares = higher share prices.
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Hang on then. If companies are trying to sell things yet no one will buy them, market forces dictate that the companies reduce their prices to a level people can afford.
You're very naive ... You know that, right?
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It's a self-correcting problem. If automation puts too many people out of work, those people cannot afford to buy what the automated factories are producing. And thus demand for whatever that automated factory is producing will drop. At which point it becomes in the best interests of the automated factory owner to make sure thei
Re: Good idea, but... (Score:3)
I like some of your ideas...
Buy some land and start a homestead...
I'm almost 50 years old. I have zero interest in being part of some robotic future. I can wipe my own ass thank you very much. I'd rather live in the woods and make jam. I think a huge number of people feel this way.
Offer services to a farmer....sounds like a feudal system. No thanks. I'd probably just crawl away and die.
Don't have kids...too late! I am part of this problem, and honestly, I really hope my kids reach adulthood before th
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is fun to hypothesize about robots taking over, and how society is going to adapt to post-scarcity, but that is theoretical conjecture, and not based on the reality of what is actually happening today.
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
Human beings, unlike some other living creatures on Earth, are not evolved and adapted to any specific environment. If the environment changes, we'll pick up our marbles and go play somewhere else. The history of humanity is a series of great disruptions and changes . . . sure, a lot of folks die prematurely along the way, but the vast majority seems to just muddle on.
Human beings are like toenail fungus . . . very difficult to get rid of completely.
Actually, automation has steadily been destroying jobs at a pretty good rate. The thing is, and what we humans are good at, that we're adapting to new conditions. Take garbage collection, previously you had 4 people, 2 operators and two collectors. Now that's down to 1 or 2 operators and realistically, the 2nd operator is only required by union or OH&S rules. As I've said, we've been adapting, university participation rates amongst young people in 1950 were 3.4% of the UK population, in 2013 it's over 50%. We've been replacing the automated jobs with higher skilled opportunities.
Now this robot isn't going to replace any jobs here in the developed world because we either outsourced clothing manufacturing to the developing world decades ago... or bought it back in recent years to be done by robots. The only real clothing industry in the west that requires staffing, are the high end tailors (read: completely bespoke, the cost of which makes your made to measure Armani look positively peasant in comparison) and that isn't a huge industry. So this robot will only affect developing nations with large manual seamstress operations (I.E. China, Honduras, Bangladesh).
That being said, advances in technology are looking to put a fair few industries out of human employment. Not just manual labour, but a lot of what used to be considered, safe careers will be replaced by soft AI's. Particularly ones that don't require a great deal of problem solving and rely on applying situations to rules (I.E. accounting, legal services) and there's no stopping it. So its a good thing we're considering what happens in the near future where the number of workers far outpaces the number of opportunities available to them. This kind of thing has happened in the past, if it wasn't dealt with in advance (like in the UK and US) it usually ended with the leaders and aristocrats being hoisted from balconies (I.E. Russia).
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Now this robot isn't going to replace any jobs here in the developed world because we either outsourced clothing manufacturing to the developing world decades ago... or bought it back in recent years to be done by robots.......So this robot will only affect developing nations with large manual seamstress operations (I.E. China, Honduras, Bangladesh).
But that should be very, very concerning to them and every country near them. The West has been very profitable by making goods where it's cheapest to make them. That's not going to stop. As you noted, we're bringing manufacturing back, except it's all automated because that's cheaper than the import duties now.
Clothing is one of the last remaining large-scale manual-labor goods that we import into the US, outside of electronics. If we can make clothing here for less than importing, that's going to
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The civilization of the 1700s has been thoroughly destroyed, only distorted tokens of that culture remain today.
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
Yep. Watching old documentaries it's crazy to think about how many people doing things used to take.
PBS had a Walt Disney documentary and they showed rooms full of people drawing. Complaining of low pay, long hours and no credit. A middle schooler could crank out the level of animation they were doing with some scripting.
The old rail way system is fascinating at how many jobs it used to take. People to mechanically throw switches. People to go around and lubricate every single point. Teams of engineers to draw machine test each part. All sans internet. Teams of people to load and unload every car by hand.
Mining was the same way. Human history is full of "throw warm bodies at the problem, figure it out, automate it and move on". Computers came about because we figured out and automated a whole lot of everything we used to do before them.
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
You are kinda whining too, but let's take this elsewhere.
How about some prognostication or even discussion of what might follow? It is bottome tier of the food chain easy to say Everyone will have jobs, world without end, amen. But that's ending up sounding like Malthus detractors who say he will always be wrong, and that means that you argue for an infinite number of people being able to exist on earth because "Malthus is always wrong".
In other words, it is folly to declare that everyone will get better jobs after all the jobs are gone, based on the fact that the industrial revolution created jobs in industry. The goal of the automation is not to make factories that make stuff. The goal is to get rid of humans in all money generating processes in order to lessen expenses and increase profits for shareholders. Humans extracting money from the process by employment will be marked for elimination when possible.
So what do you think? After almost all menial work is gone, what will people do? What happens as this process moves up the food chain?
So far, the answers I've received to this question - when I've received one - are along the lines of "I don't know, but I do know more jobs will be created" Which isn't an answer - its an expression of faith.
So I'll start......
As success in elimination of human employees continues, there will be a large and growing class of surplus population that do not produce. It is pretty simple that this will be a drain on the economy, as more people will be unemployed than employed.
Here is a forking moment. When we decide as societies whether to keep this surplus population alive or not. Will we decide that their lives are worth something, or will we continue to believe in the adage that has been true for most of humanity - work or die?
The other concept is almost a utopian idea, of people freed from labor if they wish, to pursue education, or just hang out and enjoy life.
I'm saying about 75 percent likely that we will choose the first setup - the excess population will be marked for death. But most of us don't want to have an obviously genocidal situation, so we will have some pretty grisly wars. I predict somewhere around 95 to 99 percent reduction in human population.
Then, if we haven't reduced ourselves to hunter gatherer status - which cures the problem of employment - we'll hopefully be able to enjoy the fruits of a society where work is optional.
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What's a "household income"? Want to bet that the average $racial_slur family with 10 adult kids and 20 cousins living in the same household has a higher "household income" despite me working as security consultant and them picking apples?
In other words, can we get that statistic per capita?
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(*) Roughly speaking, population is remaining steady. Meanwhile, productivity keeps rising.
It's not a zero-sum game. Instead of one man in a digger we could hire fifty with shovels but the cost of digging a ditch would rise massively. If anything you'd want the fifty people to take 10 minute shifts driving the digger and doing something productive with the rest of their time. Productivity is good, you think being unproductive is somehow a virtue?
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I can only hope that one man with a digger is cheaper than 50 with shovels. I am not so sure that he really is in this time and age...
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In five years the digger is automated and doesn't need breaks. Also it'll work 24/7.
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And considering the sliding wages it can still be more expensive to operate than the 50 people with shovels.
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The number of jobs isn't shrinking. There is an almost infinite amount of work out there which _could_ be done by someone.
The question is, what will people choose to do in order to maximize their effort to benefit others the most (which is what workers get paid for, benefiting others in some way). Based on this article, the answer to that will shift for some people yet again and it will be away from sewing clothes and towards something else, now that sewing clothes can be done more efficiently with more aut
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So where will the people with skills in fine coordination for sewing and similar tasks go when all those tasks get automated by robots?
Designing the clothes? How many different designs of t-shirts can you make that don't just look like a palette swap - something I'm sure can also be easily automated? Bonus points: The designs have to be something people will actually wear.
In the past, changes like these have pushed people to other industries - but now we are automating ALL THE INDUSTRIES. Then what?
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Quality-checking / error fixing... Something that is completely missing today..
This can be automated in many ways, and it often is, when anyone wants to pay for it. Almost nobody can afford to pay for quality goods, and engineering often produces working goods even without testing, so most goods are crap.
Tailor for custom made clothes or repairing/repurposing old clothes.... Takes a lot of time per customization too so should grab a large chunk of those...
Nope. If a robot can sew a tee shirt today, it will be able to do tailoring work soon enough. This is the point that you and many others seem to be missing — we are now automating the remainder of those jobs which low-skilled individuals can do. We are leaving only high-skilled
Re:Good idea, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
The number of jobs isn't shrinking. There is an almost infinite amount of work out there which _could_ be done by someone.
No, that's bullshit on literally every level. First, nothing human is almost infinite. We're tiny little squishy things. Second, we are using up natural capital faster than it can be replenished already. We need to engage in less economic activity, not more. We use up our year's allotment of resources by mid-August. We need to do less work as a species, or we will surely perish. Third, in order for someone to be paid for work, someone has to be willing to pay for it. It's not enough for it to theoretically be work, it has to actually be work. And the ultra-wealthy are accumulating cash that they literally cannot physically spend before they die, and then refusing to invest it, which is how jobs are created. They're not the "job creators", they are the job preventers.
The question is, what will people choose to do in order to maximize their effort to benefit others the most
The question is, will the already-rich fucks who have all the money take their finger off the wheel, and start placing bets themselves so that someone else can have some money?
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Please, just one example of how the rich don't invest their money.
Here, I googled around just to see how easy it was to find this stuff, and it's pretty hilarious. I liked this article on accounting tricks only available to the wealthy [accounting-degree.org], because it wasn't even specifically about that and yet [the first] three of ten "tricks" listed in the article are investment dodges for the purposes of tax evasion - the money is technically "invested", but in a phony way that doesn't employ people or get taxed.
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Roughly half the population has an IQ below average. Bleeding the other half to lower the cost of education for everyone is not going to help.
The real issue is not education, it's the fucking sorcerer's apprentices at the Fed who unleash their flawed models on real people. It's the meddlers in Washington who should focus on their real mandate (the army and the postal service). It's the common thieves in TSA uniforms that strangle the transportation industry with more impact than the terrorists.
China has not
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Half of any population will have a below-average IQ. Educating the tail-end of the curve on this fact—and the difference between "less" and "fewer"—would improve the quality of our discussion if nothing else.
Leaving your ignorance of math, language, and the role of the Chinese public sector aside, the article is about poor people watching their ability to make an honest living evaporate and all you've done is insult them from a position of comically unjustified smugness.
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economic value isn't the end-all be-all of life. Education and knowledge are intrinsically valuable and an educated society is better than an uneducated one. Unless you're some kind of philistine, in which case your opinion is invalid until you learn more.
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Great. Then we'll have a population that can do what they have been trained to do, and only that, while at the same time believing the next bullshit peddler telling them Earth is flat, there's no viruses and invisible sky daddy built it all.
Because education that would allow them to know better and tell the lunatic to go away, pfft, who needs that?
Re:US production (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrary to what you've been brainwashed to believe, there is no economical value in education beyond the point where someone can use it. There's already legions of people walking around with worthless college diplomas, and yet you're suggesting to take money out of people's pockets to create more of those.
No, the problem is that people seem to think education should give people the exact skills and knowledge they need to do a specific job. That's stupid because the nature of work changes over time, even over the three or four years someone studies for.
University level education is more about giving people a mixture of skills for further learning and general knowledge of common techniques. That's why most courses include general classes on things like economics, basic law, mathematics, English, research techniques, the scientific method etc.
It's then supposed to be up to employees to specialize new employees, with training and accumulated experience.
Instead companies want to treat workers as commodities, and if they can't get those skills locally they just import them. The idea of finding someone who has proven they can learn and has the skills necessary to do so to a high standard and training them doesn't seem to fit the model of "next quarter's bonus" very well.
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I heard some don't know the difference between "much" and "many". Frightful!
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But since IQ is distributed, at least roughly, on a gauss bell curve, your example simply suffers from a small sample size.
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What it really suffers from (modulo total lack of originality) is imprecision. Average is just a measure of central tendency. It can refer to the mode, median or mean (and there are several types of those, too).
Assuming wrong party at fault. (Score:2)
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But the more we automate, the more the remaining jobs - the ones that can't be automated for whatever reason - will require the absolute best of the best. NOT everyone are MENSA members in top physical and mental condition at all times, and there is no way they can be - yet that will be the requirement for the jobs that remain.
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I would rather actually fund education so more people would be qualified for work beyond being a meat-part in a machine, doing the same thing over and over again for days, months, years.
Automation seeks to destroy the concept of employing an uneducated human.
AI seeks to destroy the concept of employing an educated human. It won't even take true AI to do this, just "good enough" AI.
Sorry, but the justification to even educate a human is shrinking, not growing.
ummm. No. (Score:2)
Just a few problems with your analysis..
You seem to think that 'production' and GDP are the same thing, they most certainly are not. A significant proportion of US 'GDP' is produced by foreign companies, for a start.
Then you think that number can just be made available 'to spend'? Interesting - complement false of course, but interesting. You really dont know what the term means, do you.
You also seem to think UBI, etc are ways to 'spread wealth'. Believe it or not UBI is specifically NOT designed for that,
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We have since long already transitioned, in fact we've been in the "new" system for a very long time. If you thought that wealth comes from your labor capacity, think again : our system is called capitalism, and all wealth comes from capital.
Long time ago, capital was measured in the number of slaves you owned, until recently it was measured in the number of workers producing stuff for you, it is now changing to the number of mineral and digital slaves you own. The principles stay the same, if you own nothi
Re:US production (Score:4, Insightful)
US production per worker is currently about $58,000 [google.com], and seems to be going up by $10,000 per decade.
That's per capita, meaning "per person". If the per-capita output were distributed equally to every man, woman, and child everyone would have about $58.000 to spend. Each year. Including kids and babies. And they could do it again next year.
This will only go up as AI and automation take over. A huge number of driving jobs will be taken over by self-driving vehicles in the next decade (already happening with long-haul trucks), and AI and robotics will take over ever more of the production, working 24/7 and making more goods, more cheaply, and faster than humans.
More goods, and faster than humans? Gee, that's nice. Too bad the unemployable masses won't have any disposable income to buy any of that massively efficient inventory of goods and services. And the wealthy elite left with money won't be buying 10 million units of each.
We need to transition away from the current economic system real soon, or suffer massive riots and the downfall of our culture as unemployed people riot and take it down for us.
We need a way to spread the wealth out a little more evenly. UBI is one way, and we're getting really close to the point where UBI will be cheaper than the cost of government assistance plus the lost cost of higher crime and prison for the poor.
First of all, taxing the wealthy elite to fund UBI appears to be just about the only way to fund it, and we all know how easy it is to extract taxes from them today. This is is the first challenge of UBI, and it's a considerable one.
The little taxes you do succeed to extract will be so obscenely small that UBI will be Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses and not a penny more, confirming my initial statement regarding disposable income and goods and services. Those currently on welfare are not exactly living a glamorous lifestyle. As an example of the impact, Apple is one of largest corporations on the planet, and sells tens of millions of units, but essentially makes nothing that would be considered an affordable necessity for those barely able to fund their sustenance.
Perhaps taxing the robots and using the money to fund the rest of UBI would work.
Taxing the robots is taxing the wealthy elite. I've already described how that will work out. They'll lobby to maintain tax havens and loopholes, and lobby to pay the bare minimum. And they will succeed, much like they do today.
We could also lower the SS retirement age, or go to a 4-day work week.
To do what, drain it even faster, and accelerate it's already predicted death? Automation seeks to remove the human worker altogether, so there won't be a 4-day work week. It will be a 0-day work week for the unemployable masses.
Lots of options, many would work or could be made to work.
But we have to start transitioning just about now, or risk the downfall of our culture.
Many won't work. Greed N. Corruption is the CEO of capitalism now. Solve for that issue first, and then you might have a chance. Probably not though. Eat the Rich might be one option after the downfall.
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Not sure if serious.
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Erh... you know that the poor are more and that guns are cheap enough for them to afford them, right?
You might want to rethink that idea.
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A UBI-like system can coexist with a purely capitalist-based economy if UBI is replaced by dividends and workers whose jobs are replaced by robots are compensated by shares in the company that owns the robots to the extent that the dividends would be equivalent to the production from the automation.
Well, no. No it cannot. That just leaves all the people who cannot work in the gutter. Your proposal is inferior to UBI. You fail because you care only about workers, not about people.
Re:US production (Score:5, Interesting)
If I'm a lineman busting my ass day in and day out risking my life and limb for your electricity to stay on, and I have the opportunity to work for $60k, but you're making 58k sitting on your ass collecting UBI, guess what I won't be doing for much longer
If someone is making 58k on UBI and you're making 60k as a lineman then, guess what, their take home is 58k and yours is 118k. Why ignore the fact that the U in UBI stands for universal?
If I make $50k and a loaf of bread costs $2 before the automation / AI schism, but I make $100k and a loaf of bread costs $4 after, nothing's changed, except the number on my income tax return looks more impressive.
One possible answer to this 'problem' is that there's only so much bread you can eat. If you spent, and still spend, 40% of your salary on bread (as a synonym for food) previously you had $30k left over whereas now you have 60k left to spend.
Oh wait, your argument is that everything will inflate. An 'interesting' hypothesis, albeit not one grounded in reality. Quite apart from the fact that introduction of UBI wouldn't double overall income / wages you're also completely ignoring the changes that are the reason for its suggested introduction in the first place. Now, while it is true that real wages in many western economies aren't keeping up with inflation, and haven't been for a while, a large part of the reason for this is what I think of as international rebalancing. If you take a look outside your relatively pampered life and get a bit of global socio-historical perspective you might start to see why it's happening, why it's necessary, and why it's 'right'.
If it costs $5 / $6 / $7 then I've lost out on buying power, and if that trend continues, it won't be long before I'm waiting in the bread line, burning $100 bills to stay warm; right along side the other 'millionaires'.
Sigh. And yet more FUD.
T-Shirt robots and other productive things won't be HERE, contributing to the GDP, paying into our tax base. They'll be in China and other countries where existing production lines are, because the supply chains are there to support it, because we friggin gutted ours. The engineering and design jobs may be here, for a little while. Until those are also taken to China, to be closer to the actual production.
From TFS: "Tianyuan Garments has invested $20 million in a 100,000-square foot factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, planned to open in 2018". Sure, in comparison to recent figures relating to investment in factory production in the US, $20 million is small beans but we are talking $5 T-Shirts here, not $500 phones.
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"So that's like... a few dozen jobs at the most?"
More. Sweatshops will be renamed to Oilshops and there will all be lost jobs in the police force raiding those sweatshops, the illegal immigrant smuggling gangs will lose members and even the Chinese 'Uncle' boss in Chinatown will have to reduce the number of Kois in his restaurant aquariums.
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I, for one, welcome our new T-shirt sewing overlords.
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And I'm sure you can find a legally resilient definition of "undue profit", right?
huh (Score:2, Interesting)
And is this supposed to be great news for Little Rock, Arkansas, which will see a huge growth in the 27 jobs needed to operate this new automated factory?
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Yeah. For the cost of feeding 17 starving children in Bangladesh for a month, you could buy a small cup of coffee. :-D
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Or 10 large ones. Ok, it won't be at Starbucks, but...
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"Good intentions", meet "unintended consequences" (Score:2, Funny)
I think this time the pressure isn't from cost, rather the pressure for ethical clothing manufacture, which admittedly, has good intentions in trying to make manufacturers pay their workers more, but while that seems like a simple solution, to pay workers more, so is not employing people... Can't be exploiting your staff if you haven't got any...
So unintended consequences screws up good intentions, again. Using "unintended consequences" loosely, its not as if this sort of thing was "unforeseen" by those who had a microeconomics class. But hey, no foul, good intentions outweigh simplistic shallow solutions to extremely complex matters.
Why they chose Little Rock. (Score:3)
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the ideal situation is to have your own business and to hire absolutely nobody to do all the work
Except when the business involves "pimping out" your people.
Friend of mine currently has 26 employees working for various clients, and on the cheapest of his resources he makes $35 per hour, after payroll. And thanks to a clever group insurance setup they're essentially paying his premiums while getting far less benefits.
Re: huh (Score:2)
And how are the people enabled to buy products when no one is working? Furthermore, employment regulations exists that business owners cannot exploit people and have them to treat like human beings. The concept behind it is called him and rights.
Re:huh (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe it was Henry Ford who once said that it made no sense to pay his workers so little they could never afford to buy one of his cars.
Good luck running a successful business in a world where only business OWNERS make money with which to buy stuff.
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goodbye 3rd world countries.
Strictly speaking, there are no third world countries as of the end of the Cold War.
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then when you hear "Free money for everyone" you have to think there is something wrong.
It has become my experience that people seem to hear what they want to hear, rather then what's been said.
That being said, when you hear social responsibility and think "fuck you, I've got mine, why should I support all those losers" there is something very wrong indeed!
It's here. (Score:2, Insightful)
Welcome to the future.
Low skilled jobs will truly be gone pretty damn quick. We really do need to take a look at how we will handle this as a society. If there are hundreds of thousands of people put out of work over the next decades it won't end well without a plan.
Re: It's here. (Score:2)
stop having babies
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You cannot plan that, the production means are in private hands.
Well, technically, if it was just in the hands there wouldn't be so many babies...
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Ok, who let the Commie in?
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And that's the fallacy: Fewer and fewer people are needed for the same production output. But producing != profit. Producing only generates cost. Only after selling a product you also generate revenue. Selling, though, requires three things: A potential customer to exist, said customer wanting your product and also being able to afford it.
The reason why our economy is in the dump is that we ignored the demand side of the equation fully. We produced like there's no tomorrow without considering that only afte
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Repetitive jobs, not simply low-skilled jobs, are the ones at risk. The job has to be the kind that can be automated. Manufacturing is most efficient when it makes loads of identical or nearly-identical-with-predictable-variation units, and it becomes even more cost effective when humans are no longer required to perform those tasks repetitively. That $200,000 robot may cost more than the $40,000 worker, but if that robot produces for more than five years without significant maintenance or downtime then
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The real value (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually this isn't true.
Even custom made clothing can be affordable. Yes, the coat will cost more than the 40 bucks that piece costs where two parts are sewn together, but unlike said bag it will actually fit.
I could well see that this may become the next low level status symbol, there's plenty of people capable of tailoring and able to actually form press and iron clothing parts into form fitting shapes, and it can be (and is) done for "normal" people.
The Bad News for some. (Score:2)
The offshoring of textile jobs is about to die.
Interesting that a Chinese company chooses the US for it's robot factory.
Talent, not labor is important.
the education resistant idiots in the US are equally screwed.
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> Interesting that a Chinese company chooses the US
> for it's robot factory.
It's predictable enough. There's enough xenophobia scourging the country these last couple years that "Made in the USA" on the label will command a higher price, or even a purchase in the first place, in many areas. And most of the "made in 'murka" crowd won't bother to do the research to determine the lineage of the parent company anyway; so long as they can see that tag. Seems like a win to me.
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It makes sense. Once labor costs are close to zero, shipping finished products to the US probably accounts for the most significant cost. Shipping raw materials in bulk to the place where you're going to sell the finished product just makes sense.
How do we avoid the return of Luddites? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know most people who work in technology don't really care about the "working class" who are obviously going to be affected greatly by this and other automation. It's easy to look at your DevOps-y CI/CD pipeline, see the code you write immediately go into production, and assume that it would be great to do this with factory work as well. I assure you that people will start to care when those workers start going after everyone who still has a job out of desperation, or when their jobs are eliminated through automation.
We haven't worked out a perfect solution for what happens when the vast majority of workers can't sell their labor for a reasonable price that lets them survive and consume at levels capable of sustaining businesses. Spend some time outside of the technology world, and you will see that _many_ people aren't capable of handling anything more than a job involving repetitive tasks. Lots of people need that job on an assembly line putting Part A into Slot B and adding a screw for 8 hours a day, or driving a forklift in a warehouse, or processing the same paperwork day in and day out according to rules. If you say they can't have that anymore, then you need to come up with a solution. Money's not going to disappear overnight as a store of value, and removing people's ability to earn will not end well at all. People who wouldn't dream of violence will get desperate when they lose any hope of making it.
tl;dr: Some people lost the IQ lottery, no two ways about it. You aren't going to turn a factory worker into a big data scientist. Figure out how to fix this without bloodshed, massive depopulation, gene editing/selection, Soylent Green, or similar. The things I think could work would be make-work type jobs as an employer of last resort, or just dropping the farce and giving a basic income funded by taxing means of automation. I like the idea of a basic income because along with price controls, it basically sets a floor on poverty. Let the basic income pay completely for the necessities of life, have people work part- or full-time for extra income, make it so businesses can't just raise the price of everything to compensate for the added income, and people won't have a cash-scarcity problem.
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The actual Luddites were not anti-technology. They were on one side of a labour dispute over working conditions. They damaged machines because some labour disputes involve property damage.
We already know what happens when people can't sell their labour because there is no industry that can employ them and all sides of politics do nothing: they vote for the first candidate who sounds like they're taking their grievances seriously even if said candidate is just exploiting them. In the most recent case, that w
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But seriously, there will always be new jobs that can be created. For instance those data scientists need people gathering and inputting data.
That's another job which is going away. It's being replaced by web forms and phone robots. Nice work on the example there, sport.
Services that society could not afford will suddenly become affordable. Like maids/servants, now it is too expensive to hire someone like that. Look how many people still do menial work that is too expensive to outsource. All those jobs will come back if some people have no work but the wealth of the country as a whole increases.
Horse shit. The wealth of the country as a whole is irrelevant, it's the distribution of wealth that matters. If The People don't have money, then those jobs will never be created. The way the system works is that capital accretes capital, like fat clogs in a drain pipe catching more blobs of fat. The fat just makes the pipe narrower and narrower until nothing flows through it any
Sutures (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how big the step would be to get that robot to make a suture, sewing skin instead of a t-shirt.
Two years ago, I had a bite at a restaurant but the meal didn't sit so well. I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and for some reason lost consciousness. I got to my senses and discovered I was bleeding profusely from an actually very small cut in my forehead. I went to the doc next morning and he stitched the cut.
Two weeks later, he removed the stitches and told me he was quite happy with the result. He mentioned that the cut was actually not a straight cut, but a "hook" which apparently is difficult to cleanly close without later showing an obvious scar.
From the summary: "uses machine vision to spot and adjust to distortions in the fabric". It would be very interesting to know whether it could lay a stitch to prevent scar tissue.
Well... (Score:2)
I see a price dump for prostitutes, both of age and under, in a few less developped countries in the near future.
Shame...
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So those losing jobs to robots domestic will be able to afford hookers at their vacation destination again.
The system works!
Keep buying those $50 t-shirts (Score:2)
Limited time offer (Score:5, Insightful)
Speed versus cost (Score:4, Insightful)
. SoftWear Automation's big selling point is that one of its robotic sewing lines can replace a conventional line of 10 workers and produce about 1,142 t-shirts in an eight-hour period, compared to just 669 for the human sewing line.
That depends ENTIRELY on the costs involved and you'll notice costs were not mentioned at all here. It's possible to automate all sorts of things but it doesn't matter if the costs don't work out favorably. Faster does not automatically equal economic efficiency. You have to do a minimum efficient volume of work and the cost of labor has to be sufficiently high to make the capital investment worthwhile. Most textile work is done overseas in countries with VERY low labor rates. It doesn't matter if it is 10 times faster if it is 20 times more expensive.
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But there are other costs as well, like shipping. Then there are benefits beyond cost. Let's say you can get a garment custom-sized for you because computer vision tailoring systems are a real thing. Now you want to be able to try it on in real-time to verify the fit. You don't want to wait for it to ship from Asia to be able to try it on, so a local robot makes it cheaper and faster than local humans would. You get to try it on the same day, and the deal gets closed more quickly. A lot of people woul
Automating a new market (Score:3)
But there are other costs as well, like shipping.
True but this is well understood among those of us who work in manufacturing.
A lot of people would be willing to pay somewhat more for quick delivery of custom-made clothing.
While there is a market for quickly made custom clothing, it's unclear exactly how big it is and it is clear that the technology to make it happen on a large scale is not yet economically viable. I design assembly lines and production systems for a living. The economics of automating what you describe require rather substantial scale to become viable. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Nobody is willing to invest in the ex
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Re:shocked (Score:5, Funny)
I honestly thought a robotic sewing machine would be called SEWER instead of LOWRY.
That name stinks.
Re:We need basic income or do you want smash the r (Score:4, Funny)
I thought jails were gender-segregated. How are you going to get a broad in a jail?
Re:We need basic income or do you want smash the r (Score:5, Insightful)
No. OMG, just No.
Instead of $12, can I get a decent shirt, made locally, not by children in Asia, for $3? Perhaps you can be employed in servicing the machines.
Please, go throw a brick through the window of a combine, or modern tractor, and insist we all go back to manual reaping and threshing. Or tear down miles of electrified fence, spill the livestock from the feedlots, and insist it's your God given right to be a shepherd.
When you realize the futility in that, then maybe you should learn to code. Or play a musical instrument. Or sing and dance. Or raise and love a child. Or extract a principle of nature from odd and surprising observations. Or recycle the mountains of plastic floating in the south Pacific, or your local landfill. When machines can do all those things then you can smash society without me getting in your way. Except, if a machine could raise and love a child, perhaps a special loving machine can be made just for you and your rage....
Re:We need basic income or do you want smash the r (Score:5, Informative)
What do you propose we do with the people who can't just learn to code? Society doesn't pay people to do a lot of the things you mention unless they're truly exceptional. How do you propose we allow people to make a living while maintaining the money-based economy we have?
Think outside of the dev/IT world for a second. Not everyone is super-brilliant, or even latently super-brilliant. Most people need jobs that they can just show up at, perform a set of tasks, and go home when it's done. I'd argue that lots of corporate jobs paying decent salaries boil down to applying a fixed set of rules to an input stack of work. There are a lot more modern shepherds and manual farmers out there in the world than you think. Before all the factory work was offshored or moved to non-union states, low-skilled people could have a decent lifestyle. This is just the next step -- and it's not going to end well unless we figure out a balance between the Luddites and the ultra-wealthy robot owning class locking themselves in fortresses.
Even different ... (Score:3)
What do you propose we do with the people who can't just learn to code?
I *can* code and even I'm this short of moving out of it as a main occupation alltogether. Just went into a Docker introduction last evening at one of our numeros local evening dev meetups. Entire Infrastructure setup templates with 2 hours of initial scripting. Need a new instance of an entire ERP Appserver? A few clicks, go get some coffee, come back, finished.
Add in AI/Machine Learning and regular coding jobs are *over*. ... That's wh
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And indeed clothing/textiles was the focus of much tech before then, the spinning wheel, the loom, the cotton gin, etc. It's no surprise it's helping drive the next stage.
There was a /. poll here some time ago about what the first technology was and it came down to clothing and the knife.
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The uncomfortable thing is that they refuse to cooperate for some odd reason.
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Trump keeps his word. Jobs are returning to the US. well it is only for robots, but he never said it will be for people, did he?
Yea, he has said people, at least with respect to coal jobs.
Coal jobs? You mean the jobs that probably should be replaced by robots, and sooner rather than later? Those jobs?
Automation and robotics are inevitably going to keep taking over more and more low skilled jobs. That can't, and arguably shouldn't be stopped. The problem is a lot of people don't have the ambition to transition to more higher skilled jobs, whether that is because of nature or nurture, it doesn't matter, but it seems nevertheless true.
The true problem is automation will destroy the low-end jobs. And "good enough" AI will work to destroy the high-end jobs. The problem for the masses is not ambition; most are simply incapable. This is the reason brain surgeons and rocket scientists are a rare breed; not everyone holds the intelligence or skill to become one.
Is it possible that we won't see massive unemployment anytime soon? Sure. People adapt. I'm not too worried about that, at least in my lifetime. Of a greater concern is this leads to more wealth pooling at the top few percent and money idle isn't all that useful to the economy. We need to, at minimum, tax investment income and capital gains the same as ordinary income, and ideally use the revenue delta to reduce taxes on ordinary income.
You will be as successful at taxing the wealthy elite tomorrow as