As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit
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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... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA96-WX-oXc#t=163.352979 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl2rmup2dVY [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCcZW91Ub38 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJw6oMwuJ94 [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXiEU1Dhc9M
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.
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.
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.
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.
The reason is that capitalists (the economic class, not "advocates of capitalism"; the two have substantial overlap, but aren't identical) tend to be the power behind both business and government in capitalist systems.
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) .
Try staring a business in a market with large established players. You'll find that you cannot do many of the things they themselves did to get started -- they have erected legislative barriers preventing replication.
Easy -- just write "think of the children" legislation demanding egregious safety, accounting and legal overhead, trivial to bear at scale, but lethal to new entrants...
Plus I'd imagine a large spike in people who write novels and other arts. Other humanities and R&D can fill the void for those not gainfully employed. Which contributes to the progress of society.
You have to go one level deeper with something cloneable, but there is still scarcity.
The cost of a downloadable audio book is going to be based on maximizing the return based on its demand curve (since the supply curve is vertical).
The demand curve is going to be based on the scarcity/cost of an equivalent value audio book (if an audio book is $1000, you'll probably buy a different one from another author instead). Thus, this ties back into the scarcity of supply, which is tied to the scarcity of labor (skilled in this case) to generate that supply. There is a certain amount of labor required to become skilled (and to a lesser extent scarcity of talent), and more labor to produce an audio book. This scarcity of labor keeps audio book prices from dropping to zero.
I'd say we should distribute it across age groups, but this lets you use the existing Social Security Infrastructure. Plus, young people don't vote in legislative and local elections, so that wouldn't be as useful for preserving the freedom to automate.
Ok. Are you going to be the one that has to give up their job forever?
This concern is a valid one: keeping the current paradigm, automation will lead to unemployment on a massive scale which will wreak havoc everywhere especially in underdeveloped countries with little to no social safety net or worker and citizen protection. Keeping the current paradigm, the capitalists will reap even more obscene profits by absorbing the difference between the current salaries and the much lower automation costs, while potentially tens to hundreds of millions of people (in the short term only) will be out of jobs and left with no means of survival. This is very concerning to me, and attacking a straw man with a ridiculous "oh let's close the factories then shall we" is childish.
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.
Who should bear the responsibility of that decision? The workers? The governments of the workers? The governments of the consumers? Or the consumers?
First, the ability to be self-sufficient is curtailed by the government through entitlements granted to a select few by the ruling class.
The Enclosures in England [1] are the canonical example. Agricultural land once used by everyone is privatized. With their livelihood threatened, the rural populations are driven to the cities to seek employment in dangerous factories.
Most industrial societies are based on this concept. The sweatshop isn't doing anyone any favors. They are simply another side of the same coin.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop/bad_cop
[1] http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...
One common answer -- and part of the reason why capitalism [0] has basically been replaced by the modern mixed economy (which, confusingly, is often called "capitalism", though its not really, being more of a synthesis between the thesis of 19th century capitalism and its antithesis in 19th century socialism) everywhere in the developed world since at least the middle of the last century -- is that sweatshops are evil for the first reason, and capitalism is evil for the second reason.
[0] the 19th Century system for which the term was coined.
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.
it is a false dichotomy for many reasons. One of them - the most basic one - is that we have high productivity enough in the developed world to not allow former sweatshops workers to starve.
Better situations exist and are possible, but they do not prove the nonexistence of the former.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
False dichotomy doesn't mean that one of the options doesn't exist, it means there is an additional option not being considered -- that is, industry and government coordinating to create safe working environments and pay livable wages.
Regarding "starve to death" part, the government also suppressed crop prices so that these aforementioned workers could make their living with horribly low wages. Of course, this in turn meant that farming villages couldn't support as many people as they could if the price was determined by free market, ensuring a stream of people eager to work in factories.
So it's not exactly "sweatshops keep people from starving to death." Sometimes, those who enable sweatshops also make sure (whether intentionally or through apathy) that people would otherwise live one step from starvation.
On the other hand, decades of misery transformed South Korea into one of the world's leading industrial nations, so... I guess it's complicated.
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.
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
How much slower can you go?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLEx-WaF9A
Pocket sewing. Again, done in the late 1980s.
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
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
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.
(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.)
Leaving aside the objectification in that sentence (not because its not problematic, just because other than acknowledging its existence there isn't a lot to say about it), women have been treating leggings as pants for considerably longer then Lululemon has existed. (Though Lululemon was involved in -- how much spurring and how much just benefitting from is probably debatable -- the most recent resurgence in popularity of that.)
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 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)
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.
Publicly expressing gratitude to a clothing manufacturer for the pleasure you receive watching on the street, OTOH, is clearly objectification.
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.)
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.
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".