
As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit - miraj
https://boingboing.net/2016/07/19/as-sewbots-threaten-asias-sw.html
======
Animats
The article comes from a study by the International Labor Organization.[1]

All this seems to come from one startup, Softwear Automation, which has just
some lab demos and can't put a whole garment together.[2]

First of all, the textile industry has been mechanized for a long time. It was
the first industry to mechanize, over 200 years ago. Everything from picking
to weaving was mechanized in the developed world by 1940 or so. Cutting and
sewing are now semi-automatic, and slowly going automatic.

If you've never seen a modern loom, here's one in action at a trade show.[3]
Here's a working textile factory.[4] The looms pretty much run themselves.
Note how few people are in the textile factory. Even third world countries
have this technology. Low labor costs cannot beat a 1000RPM Toyota jet loom.

Sewing has advanced to the semi-automated stage. There are lots of machines
where a human lines up the fabric and the machine does the rest.[5] The main
remaining problem is handling and placing fabric automatically. The T-shirt
and jeans manufacturers still haven't solved that problem, though they're
getting close.

Production of simple shapes such as towels and sheets is almost totally
automated. Here's a factory in Bangladesh. Massive machines, few people.[6]

Summary: most of textile automation has already happened. The last step,
sewing of complex garments, is the only part that hasn't been automated yet.
Expect T-shirt and jeans production to go full auto in the next decade.

[1]
[http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actemp/whatwedo/a...](http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actemp/whatwedo/aseanpubs/report2016_r1_techn.htm)
[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA96-WX-
oXc#t=163.352979](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA96-WX-oXc#t=163.352979)
[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl2rmup2dVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl2rmup2dVY)
[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCcZW91Ub38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCcZW91Ub38)
[5]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJw6oMwuJ94](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJw6oMwuJ94)
[6]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXiEU1Dhc9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXiEU1Dhc9M)

~~~
colanderman
What makes T-shirts and jeans more complex than other shirts and pants?

~~~
hactually
It's the fact that they're composed of multiple differently shaped pieces and
need to be combined carefully.

I've tried putting a robot together myself as I find it silly that we haven't
already automated it and... yeah, harder than i thought.

~~~
inabar
I'm curious whether anyone's tried something like heat fusing instead of
stitching for synthetic fibers. Or maybe precise gluing for natural fibers. It
seems kind of like we're using robots to automate carriage making...

~~~
sedachv
Ultrasonic sewing machines have been around for decades. They are very limited
in the fabrics they can work with and are mostly used for industrial textile
products, disposable items, and for things that need to be waterproof, like
dry bags.

Gluing is used a lot for things like interfacing (stiffening collars) and
hemming. You need a fairly large seam area to get good adhesion. Since the
glue makes the fabric stiffer this would make the seam uncomfortable.

------
boznz
"Who will benefit from automation?"

Easy answer the companies profits and the automation machine manufacturer and
support companies.

Additionally the "Made in good old USA" sticker or wherever you happen to be
brings up images of a local using timeless traditional methods making the
garment, apart from a very few very expensive items that image is obviously a
joke but it certainly works for sales and marketing to manipulate peoples
perception and many will pay more for the sticker.

~~~
chrischen
Let's get rid of the factories for cars, silicon, and electronics while we are
at it. Efficiency is not conducive to jobs and prosperity. Workers must unite
to protect livelihoods! (end sarcasm).

~~~
dmix
And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy
union between the state and upper class. There's a reason many pro-market
people want smaller gov and it's not just personal selfish gain to save a few
dollars in taxes but to prevent the predictable selfish incentives of the
power players from exploiting the absolute power of the state for the benefit
of a limited few.

No wonder there is a backlash against globalism and 'free trade' agreements
when this same group of insular regulators and powerful market leaders are
designing the agreements and calling all of the shots. Sweatshops are hardly
the result of free trade but government controlled/financed trade that only
prioritizes the interests of the mega corps, sometimes pushed to the point of
exploitation in countries with poor legal systems and weak concepts of human
rights.

The process of creating the TPP made this even more apparent to the public,
they hardly even tried to hide the obvious favoritism and complete lack of
openness. Clearly it has become so status quo that they didn't even bother
with pretense.

~~~
jbicha
How does smaller government help with sweatshops or unemployment or income
inequality?

~~~
dmix
Basic income and small government can coexist IMO. As can a healthy legal
system and charter of rights. The level of government involvment in everyone's
day to day life has risen astronomically since the 1950s. That doesn't mean we
have to sacrifice all social safety nets and human rights in order to have a
healthy functional government.

Running a non-megacorp business and surviving without a job has not been made
easier at all since the 50-60s. It's actually harder than ever as a result of
government intervention and wasteful resource consumption for very little
benefit to society. It makes you wonder who the government has been busy
serving all of those years.

(Hint: the kind of business who wouldn't think twice about running a sweatshop
via trade deals that never seem to involve clauses to require following the
laws of the parent country) .

------
atarian
>savings of over $180,000 over 5 years

I don't know how thin the margins in this industry are, but this doesn't
strike me as a substantial cost-saving move, especially if this is how much
the US would collectively save.

------
Zikes
This is a moral dichotomy that's been around for ages and I have yet to see a
satisfactory answer on: are sweatshops evil because the workers are grossly
underpaid and work in terrible conditions, or are they good because they're
better than nothing and people will apparently starve to death otherwise?

Who should bear the responsibility of that decision? The workers? The
governments of the workers? The governments of the consumers? Or the
consumers?

~~~
chrischen
Factories and jobs in China (and other countries with factories) are good (in
general, at least). It doesn't get much simpler than that. The only people
that have issues with it are the consumers thousands of miles away who are
completely detached from the issue and realities facing those workers, and who
at the same time fuel demand by purchasing and funding those workers.

~~~
lmmlzxx
> The only people that have issues with it are the consumers thousands of
> miles away who are completely detached from the issue and realities facing
> those workers, and who at the same time fuel demand by purchasing and
> funding those workers.

Ok, that is just not true. Tell that to the garment workers here that were
shot last year by government police while protesting low wages and poor
working conditions.

~~~
chrischen
I agree with you. That's bad.

------
aaron695
> This isn't an entirely bad news story: the South Asian garment industry is
> dangerous and underpaid

Yet they are choosing it over the alternatives. unemployment, sex industry....

How about we let them chose their lives rather than somehow twisting that
firing them is a good thing.

These robots will kill people, just in boring ways like increasing child hood
mortality.

But it's going to happen, lets snap this band-aide off.

------
sedachv
Can someone point to any actual sewing robots that would make this question
not a hypothetical? I just searched Youtube and these videos came up:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iudSnw--
Y8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iudSnw--Y8)

Automated rows of buttonholes and overlocking simple edges? Done in the late
1980s.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3kNnHZdl0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3kNnHZdl0)

How much slower can you go?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLEx-
WaF9A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLEx-WaF9A)

Pocket sewing. Again, done in the late 1980s.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPb44jxA6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPb44jxA6M)

Notice the video quality? Most of those machines use regular manufacturing
automation techniques and seem to be designed in the early 1990s. They are not
adaptable to different patterns/hems/collars/pockets.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GUhlfjqQmQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GUhlfjqQmQ)

This one is actually not bad.

There was a lot of development in automated sewing in the 1980s that was
abandoned as a result of American and European apparel manufacturing
collapsing and all the work being outsourced to Asian countries and Mexico.

I have not seen any robots that can do overlock or coverstitch of shirts,
dresses or tights at full speed. Until you have that, Asian apparel factories
are not going anywhere.

It is still not clear how sophisticated and cheap cut and sew automation has
to get in order to make it cost effective as a capital expenditure. For
example textiles was already a very automated field in the 1980s but US
companies found out the hard way that capital expenditures for increasing
automation was not worth it:
[http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html)

The one area of apparel manufacturing that does look like it will be fully
automated (by definition) is complete garment knitting. The kinds of apparel
it is useful for is sportswear, tights (thank you Lululemon for convincing
women that tights are pants, sometimes it makes walking down the street that
much more enjoyable), and certain kinds of dresses and sweaters.

~~~
ksenzee
Those Lululemon garments you enjoy are leggings, not tights. Tights cover the
foot as well.

(They're not pants, either, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm more likely to
buy a women's top from ThinkGeek than Lululemon so I'm a bit outside their
target market.)

------
oh_sigh
Sewbots =~ mechanical loom?

~~~
theoh
No, robots that automate sewing. Looms are weaving machines, as you probably
know.

------
xbmcuser
Google deepmind and other such ai type software is going to make doctors,
architects, lawyers, CFA, engineers, software engineers irrelevant as well.
And I feel is a lot closer than robots that have human dexterity and can do
all physical things humans can do.

~~~
cooper12
You got anything to back that first part up or is this more singularity
hyperbole? So far the only use of robots in medicine that I'm aware of has
been to assist doctors, such as in delicate surgeries. (Or more mundane stuff
like a robot going around handing medicine) AI has huge hurdles to overcome
before it can solve real-world problems. Deepmind excelled at Go because it's
a board game that works within constraints. (really, you can learn the rules
of go in a few minutes) Even self-driving cars depend on optimal conditions
and assume an already-built infrastructure. Not only is it FUD to say that AI
will usurp us that fast, but it is also insulting to human ingenuity and
insight to say that human intelligence can be replaced with a clever
algorithm.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for everything to be automated, eliminating human
error and inefficiency, launching us into a basic income utopia (ha), but we
have to look at the situation realistically and refrain from statements that
will hold back the industry. (See things like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)
and references to skynet) The solution is to look at the actual state of the
art and to evaluate advances in their proper contexts. Consider this: we still
can't make robots that walk like humans (bipedal locomotion) and stay
balanced. (There are promising results coming from Boston Dynamics, but AFAIK
actual usage has been limited to military stuff like pack dogs)

~~~
xbmcuser
Not hyperbole I believe that is going to happen and I am not talking about ai
or sigunlaraty more about machine learning. Doctors learn about disesases and
then with experience start diagnosing them. It's a simple a+b=c now feed the
data of millions of patients their symptoms their diagnoses the most effective
remedy or cure. Computers will start finding and predicting the problems and
diseases faster and more accurately than doctors so we might need more nurses
but fewer doctors in the future. An architect designs buildings taking into
account building codes and best use of space etc. Feed thousands of blueprints
to a deeplearing machine tell all the buliding codes it has to follow. The
current climate and what is expected to be in the next few decades it will
give you the most efficient building plan that uses the most space and least
amount of energy. Feed the machine all the tax law it will find you the best
loopholes to avoid taxes A human can't take into account the number of
variables a machine will be able to in the next few years and the keep getting
more powerful everyear.Google recent announcement of using machine learning to
improver server heat efficiency is just the start. Their are thousands of such
problems that will be solved with machine and deeplearning and make many human
jobs mostly obsolete.

~~~
cooper12
If only it was ever as easy as data in = results out. The quality, accuracy,
granularity, accessibility, and existence of data is an important
prerequisite. (For healthcare in America, HIPAA will be a big hurdle) Deep
learning has been a big advance in how machine learning has been done, but we
have to be careful not to oversell it either or assume it is a panacea to all
problems in any domain. You can't just say "I'll just use a deep net here" and
expect to be done. Getting meaningful results takes training, proper design of
networks, filtering, and feedback systems. Lastly there's the issue of what is
unspecified. What if an architecture AI designs an optimal building conforming
to all proper checks, but is in the end ugly as sin. You spent all that time
creating the perfect algorithm that was trained on architecture rules and
experience, but either forgot to include or couldn't derive a metric for
aesthetics or uniqueness. What if AI doctors become infallible with instant
access to contraindications and medical literature, but in the end has no
bedside manner and no physical presence to actually convince a patient to
listen to them? What if your tax bot was deemed illegal for helping circumvent
paying taxes? You might have a solution for all of these, but the fact that
problems like these exist/could exit should be a sign that nothing is "a
simple a+b=c".

------
milesskorpen
I appreciate most of your comment, but really don't appreciate the aside in
your last paragraph.

~~~
sedachv
To appreciate the aside you have to understand Lululemon's seminal role in the
athleisure trend and the market impact it (making leggings acceptable pants)
has had on the apparel industry.

Also important to note is the sewing process required for leggings -
coverstitch of very stretchy knit fabric - is something that requires a lot of
sewing machine operator skill and is difficult to automate.

~~~
danielhooper
To appreciate the aside you have to be a creepy guy.

~~~
sedachv
What is creepy is when you are so uncomfortable with your sexuality that you
think people watching on the street is objectification.

~~~
dragonwriter
Watching on the street may or may not be (or involve) objectification.

Publicly expressing gratitude to a clothing manufacturer for the pleasure you
receive watching on the street, OTOH, is clearly objectification.

~~~
kbenson
What's lamentable is that objectification is seen universally negative, when
it isn't always necessarily. Is there real harm in appreciating the beauty of
the people around you (if that's indeed all you are doing)? The term has
become so loaded that it's hard to discuss without caveats and justifications,
because a good many will argue based on the assumption that objectification is
bad, rather than any actual harm.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Is there real harm in appreciating the beauty of the people around you (if
> that's indeed all you are doing)?

This is probably not harmful, but isn't really what people talk about when
they say "objectification" (though I suppose you can describe it as
"internalized objectification" if it involves your internal perspective of the
targets being reduced primarily to what they provide you.)

Most of what people talk about is externalized objectification, which is
outward actions which treat people as primarily to objects of your urges. And
largely on the basis that this _does_ cause harm to others, either directly
(when specifically targeted) or less directly by a number of mechanisms
(including normalizing devaluing attitudes toward the targeted class of
persons) when less individually targeted but targeting a class.

> The term has become so loaded that it's hard to discuss without caveats and
> justifications, because a good many will argue based on the assumption that
> objectification is bad, rather than any actual harm.

You seem to believe that utilitarianism is the correct, objective, and
universally accepted basis for moral discussions, such that discussing
something as problematic for any reason other than harm it does is itself a
problem.

(And you seem to describe it as harmful _a priori_ , without pointing to a
harm to anyone deriving from it, which seems problematic under its own
standards.)

~~~
kbenson
> Most of what people talk about is externalized objectification

Except we have here in this thread a case of people calling someone out on
internalized objectification.

> You seem to believe that utilitarianism is the correct, objective, and
> universally accepted basis for moral discussions

Not necessarily. I'm somewhat peeved peeved by people's assumption that if a
term is _usually_ applied to negative behavior, that they can assume when they
see that term used the behavior is negative without actually looking at the
situation. It's lazy thinking, cargo culting of moral behavior based on
_terms_ and not thoughts or actions. But even that's understandable, the real
problem is the rabid defense of this behavior and thinking when examined. It's
rational discourse vs "it's bad because it's obvious it's bad, and you not
just accepting that makes your behavior bad as well".

> (And you seem to describe it as harmful a priori, without pointing to a harm
> to anyone deriving from it, which seems problematic under its own
> standards.)

I assume you mean I describe the assumption as bad, not the behavior of
objectification, since I don't think I did that. As for that, I think I
supplied my reasoning above. In short, I think it leads to lazy thinking, and
irrational behavior.

This obviously isn't limited to "objectification" and that's not even the most
common place I see it used. I just noticed it in this discussion so decided to
mention it.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not implying you are doing anything like this. Your
comments have been clear on the objectification in this case possibly having
no ill effect. Your comment just seemed a logical place to talk about this
meta-topic. I'm also happy to discuss the basis for my own assumptions, as you
were right to focus on when presented with a comment like mine.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Except we have here in this thread a case of people calling someone out on
> internalized objectification.

If it wasn't externalized _in this thread_ , no one would have been able to
call anyone out on it. "Published in an open forum" is not "internalized".

~~~
kbenson
So I guess the question is what harm did this cause to others?

