
New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers - hourislate
https://qz.com/1064679/a-new-t-shirt-sewing-robot-can-make-as-many-shirts-per-hour-as-17-factory-workers/
======
bmcusick
$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?

~~~
snrplfth
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.

~~~
zdkl
> So why is the automation of this final step going to be the thing that
> prevents countries from climbing the "development ladder"?

I believe you're misharacterising the issue. The trouble with technology is
that well, you either have it or you don't. Labour on the other hand is
fungible. So with a sweatshop you can go from unskilled workforce to
$$$t-shirt$$$ with base supplies and bog standard infrastructure.

Acquiring, operating and conducting maintenance on precision robotics on the
other hand...

~~~
snrplfth
> _I believe you 're misharacterising the issue. The trouble with technology
> is that well, you either have it or you don't._

Technology is always a matter of degree. Let's say I have a handloom barn
making fabric and clothing. Is that already "technology"? If not, then what if
I install a diesel generator to power the looms? Then I get some treadle
sewing machines to replace hand-stitching? Then I get a laptop to replace
hand-accounting? Do I "have technology" yet? As a handloom barn owner, I
certainly couldn't have developed or manufactured a diesel generator, a sewing
machine, or a laptop, yet I can buy and maintain (or just replace) them quite
easily. Doing the same with robots is just a matter of degree and difficulty.
Compared with getting humans to do the same work, is it worth it or not?

~~~
sqeaky
I think it is a matter of competition. The unpowered loom does not enable you
to compete, but some amount of powering it and accepting a lower wage does
allow you to compete with shops that have slightly more tech. Accepting lower
wages is how these shops came into existence in the first place.

This is the first production quality version of this robot the next one could
be twice as fast. How do you compete with that?

The only way to compete is to build another machine that is cheaper or better.
This is not something Bangladesh is able to do.

~~~
snrplfth
The point is that if the robot really is that fast, _and that cheap_ , then
you don't compete - you start doing something else where the robot cannot
compete at that price. Textile workers aren't robots - they have the capacity
to shift to other work, and there's an enormous amount of work to be done.

This objection to automation has been brought up every time anything's been
invented, for hundreds of years - if we do something with less human labour,
then humans won't have work or incomes. But actually, they just end up finding
other useful things to do that weren't getting done before.

~~~
sqeaky
I don't think this is the same argument that has been made hundreds of times.
That argument is about the west. Here in the USA we could in theory train our
coal miners to write software or build build bridges or do some other useful
task.

China has way more people and much less ability to train them, but that is not
0 ability to train them. But Bangladesh... They are pretty fucked. This will
cut them out of a huge swath of the economy they were participating in
yesterday. You can't efficiently make roboticists in Bangladesh today.

EDIT - I also think complete automation is fundamentally different than
performance enhancing tools. Clearly Bangladesh has sewing machines, but that
is an entirely different price and profit category than a full blown sewing
robot.

~~~
snrplfth
This is exactly the same argument that has been made hundreds of times. "Oh,
they're simple peasants now and forever, they can't work in factories, they'll
never learn to read, they can't invent productive industries" and so on.

You seem to be implying that training for jobs is somehow something that's
done mainly by the governments of countries - that people are just passive
receptors of whatever training and education the state can provide, and can't
seek it out, or create it for themselves. This is of course wholly wrong, and
almost none of the specialized skills developed by people in the course of
industrialization are gained through formal education.

You don't have to make lots of _roboticists_ in Bangaldesh anyways (and there
aren't many of those in industrialized economies either) - people can and will
move into the sectors that have been small simply because labour was more
valuable elsewhere - services, like health care, education, retail, et cetera.
These are useful tasks no less than textile work, and largely don't require a
massive "training program".

------
amrrs
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.

~~~
Jtsummers
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).

------
hex1848
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
.. 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
Fewer.

~~~
mantas
Yes, führer

~~~
dang
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
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.

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

------
aussieguy123
$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
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.

------
dannysu
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

~~~
paulsutter
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
In this context, I think he really talks about taxing capital (or capital
investments that displace workers).

------
alex-
> "...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.

------
chrisreichel
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.

~~~
RobertoG
"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
Less transportation required, which should be cheaper and better for the
environment.

------
Overtonwindow
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
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.

~~~
deedub
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.

