Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

mnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 67 posts

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#51

Post by adventureful »

icebraining wrote: post #42
adventureful wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's not a scenario in which the US is magically going to re-dominate 55% of global manufacturing like it's 1964 all over again. But it is plausible the US can retake a portion of manufacturing.

Uh, the US has increased their manufacturing output since 1980 by 218% , and it's still head-to-head with China: http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-a...

I'm not sure what you're responding to in my comment. I fully understand America's domestic manufacturing base and scale.

The US isn't going to go back to holding 55% of global manufacturing again. There's zero chance of that happening. What part of that are you refuting?

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#52

Post by Iv »

adventureful wrote: post #46

Something that a shift to robotic manufacturing plays to is the theory of inflection points in systems. In this case, the inflection points are very very long markers in time. 1) You start at highly domestic manufacturing for most goods (mostly the case right up until the mid 19th to 20th century). 2) Global outsourcing brings huge efficiency gains through specialization and optimizations with regulation and labor co…

> the jobs kept or created domestically thrown into the value calculation.

The thing is, this is not creating much jobs. Far less than it replaces. On the global level, this causes job loss. I loath luddites, but we need to understand that, and to understand that the obstacles won't be technological but political.

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#53

Post by ippisl »

adventureful wrote: post #41
ern wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workers would be needed to create buildings, build roads and transmission lines, repair robots, scrap robots, replace robots, R&D robot tech, provide materials, and so on. It would cultivate a huge ecosystem. Wouldn't robots eventually move into those fields as well?

Are we talking 100 years out? Because you'll still need engineers to decide where to put a building, what it should look like based on financial restrictions (a robot reading your bank account to decide how much building you can afford?) and future demand projections. The robots aren't doing the financial decision making in the next 35 to 50 years. Assisted analysis (software), sure. A robot isn't going to understand…

Were not that far from mostly automated architectural design. This is from an article(in 2005) about an automated system to design custom metal buildings[1]:

"The automated engineering done with the EDS, which is still being extended, is close to 98% complete for the simplest buildings and 50-60% complete for the most complex buildings. The tasks that are remaining are not automated, as they are either highly custom, or occur so seldom that the added knowledge capture for these few occurrences does not justify the automation cost."

There's also a similar tool for design of private construction[2].I think the software even understand civil codes.

[1]http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2005/RCCstudy.html [2]http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2005/Norway_prefab.html

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#54

Post by ippisl »

adventureful wrote: post #36
franzus wrote: post #34

> return manufacturing of smartphones, computers and TVs to U.S. shores The problem with all that manufacturing being moved overseas is that local jobs are "destroyed". Moving back production for production's sake with the help of robots won't solve this problem. It will only give you a warm cozy patriotic feeling whenever you read "made in $your_country". Now I think full automation is the future and in the remote f…

I don't think that's correct at all. It will help a lot, specifically because it's not a zero sum game of just swapping Chinese based manufactured goods out for robot based goods. The US would stop sending that capital to China (a huge wealth drain), which is helping build out their economy. The US would gain wealth and capital incentives for further robotic development. The US would gain jobs around robotics in all…

One problem with this path of investing in robotic technologies, is that even if some jobs are created in the u.s., you help improve the technology so that many other jobs are becoming unnecessary.

It's hard to tell in advance if this will bring more jobs to low/medium skilled people , which are the ones mostly struggling, or destroy their jobs.

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#55

Post by makomk »

adventureful wrote: post #19
DanBC wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no direct labour. But there's still labour. People have to program the machines, and then keep the machines stocked and running, and service the machines. At the moment that's skilled work and a small number of US workers will gain at the cost of a bunch of low-paid workers in poor countries. But it won't be long before that work becomes semi-skilled (see also sub-contract electronic engineering) and is done…

Intel is a perfectly good example of how robotic manufacturing works very well and scales. If we can use robotics to mass assemble something as complex as a couple nanometer billion transistor chip, we can most definitely bring that to garments with some effort and scale it. Intel can pump out a billion processors with probably a fraction of the employee count they have now (they have 100k total, but they're not all…

Actually, last I heard Intel had outsourced the actual assembly of their chips to places like Malaysia with low labour costs because that's still not entirely automated. The only thing that they do in high-labour-cost countries is patterning and doping the wafers to create the silicon die inside the chips. That's both a lot easier to automate than sewing (no moving parts) and a lot more important to automate because, due to the small scale, they need to keep out contamination by dust which is a lot easier if few humans are involved.

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#56

Post by _delirium »

chrischen wrote: post #26

Has outsourcing manufacturing to developing countries delayed research into robotic manufacturing? Seems like such low-skilled labor is relatively easy to build into robots, but likely the already cheap costs of foreign labor has made it unnecessary to invest in large upfront costs to develop robots.

That's the conventional wisdom among commercial AI-research spinoffs: the fact that you can get such cheap human labor in a globalized labor pool has been a major impediment to commercializing pretty big segments of AI research. The funding agencies even seem to agree, and have been putting quite a bit of funding in recent years into crowdsourcing and "human computation" projects to take advantage of that labor pool, instead of trying to replace it with machines.

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#57

Post by MarkMc »

adrianN wrote: post #35
MarkMc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I usually love technological progress, but in this case it would mean many (millions?) of desperately poor people losing their jobs. I'm hoping this comes much later.

And while we're at it, let's also destroy all mechanical looms?

Interesting. Destroying mechanical looms is not a practical solution of course, but in theory yes: The benefit to so many poor people would be so great that it could be worth having an inefficient textile industry. There are probably less costly ways of helping the poor, but it would be better than the status quo.

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#58

Post by gouranga »

MarkMc wrote: post #57
adrianN wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And while we're at it, let's also destroy all mechanical looms?

Interesting. Destroying mechanical looms is not a practical solution of course, but in theory yes: The benefit to so many poor people would be so great that it could be worth having an inefficient textile industry. There are probably less costly ways of helping the poor, but it would be better than the status quo.

I've thought this for years.

Automation makes people redundant and you end up with people who consume but produce nothing. Those people are labelled as 'poor' as they are given minimal cash to survive on as they have no value to add to mainstream society.

If you increase automation and drop the retirement age in most countries to shorten the workforce and allow people to exist comfortably after retirement, I reckon you'd solve both ends of the problem i.e. less "poor" people and more people doing something constructive.

Smashing looms however doesn't do anything other than commit more people to slavery and poverty.

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#59

Post by icebraining »

adventureful wrote: post #51
icebraining wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, the US has increased their manufacturing output since 1980 by 218% , and it's still head-to-head with China: http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-a...

I'm not sure what you're responding to in my comment. I fully understand America's domestic manufacturing base and scale. The US isn't going to go back to holding 55% of global manufacturing again. There's zero chance of that happening. What part of that are you refuting?

You're right, sorry, I got mixed up.

Re: Robot sewing machines could make 'made in China' obsolete

#60

Post by lostlogin »

franzus wrote: post #34

> return manufacturing of smartphones, computers and TVs to U.S. shores The problem with all that manufacturing being moved overseas is that local jobs are "destroyed". Moving back production for production's sake with the help of robots won't solve this problem. It will only give you a warm cozy patriotic feeling whenever you read "made in $your_country". Now I think full automation is the future and in the remote f…

And another reason to be cynical, check out the labour cost on this consumer device made in China - iPhone. The savings made via further automation would be basically meaningless. I'm willing to bet that label brand clothes have far higher profit margins than i-devices too. www.asymco.com/2012/02/26/iphone-sine-qua-non/
Post reply on HN