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As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

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Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#31

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

colanderman wrote: post #23
Animats wrote: post #17

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 19…

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

With denim it becomes necessary to use some persuasion to finish the thicker seams. With Jersey knits it requires skill to avoid distorting the seams during assembly. The other side is that the the sheer volume of global production for these garment makes the cost savings from automation most compelling

Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#32

Post by chris_va »

hactually wrote: post #26
colanderman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

What was that experience like?

Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#33

Post by inabar »

hactually wrote: post #26
colanderman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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...

Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#35

Post by chris_va »

dmix wrote: post #18
good_gnu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could keep the factories, accept unemployment as a result of technical progress, realize that the total amount of goods created has not diminished at all and stop tieing the right to consume to participation in the production process. The "human in the production process" paradigm is doomed to fail as technology progresses anyway.

All the more reason basic income makes economic sense. When the alternative is inefficient and costly human labor.

Just to be picky, this is one of the weakest arguments of UBI. This gets into a "what is money" kind of discussion, but paying people because they are incapable of employment is not a good outcome. That money reprents scarcity, which traditionally has entirely been labor. In a post labor economy, what is money?

Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#36

Post by Zikes »

trhway wrote: post #13
Zikes wrote: post #3

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…

>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? it is a false dichotomy for many reasons. One of them - the most basic one - is that we have high productivity enou…

It's not a false dichotomy because it is something that exists today. The workers can either work for next to nothing in terrible conditions, or they can starve.

Better situations exist and are possible, but they do not prove the nonexistence of the former.

Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#37

Post by nikanj »

afarrell wrote: post #30
dmix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the more reason basic income makes economic sense. When the alternative is inefficient and costly human labor.

We should figure out a way create some sort of dividend that skims some money off of the benefits of automation and adds it to social security income. 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.

We have this, it's called "taxes". Not many large corporations pay any, though

Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#38

Post by WillPostForFood »

boznz wrote: post #2

"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 man…

High prices on necessities (food/housing/clothing) are like a regressive tax on the poor. Cheaper clothing will primarily benefit poor people who buy clothes.

Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#39

Post by jxramos »

colanderman wrote: post #23
Animats wrote: post #17

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 19…

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

I think he's actually suggesting that of the range of textiles and fabrics that we wear that along the dimension of complexity tshirts and jeans are the simpler designs and will thus be some of the lower hanging fruit to automate. I remember reading some documentary stuff or something about fashion evolution through the centuries and stuff was a lot more ornate a few centuries back. Then things went comparatively pretty simple in the 20th century some even argued that fashion was pushed to be simple for mass production reasons.

Re: As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

#40

Post by st3v3r »

good_gnu wrote: post #10
chrischen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Or we could keep the factories, accept unemployment as a result of technical progress, realize that the total amount of goods created has not diminished at all and stop tieing the right to consume to participation in the production process. The "human in the production process" paradigm is doomed to fail as technology progresses anyway.

"accept unemployment as a result of technical progress"

Ok. Are you going to be the one that has to give up their job forever?

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