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

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

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.

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

> 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?

One common answer -- and part of the reason why capitalism [0] has basically been replaced by the modern mixed economy (which, confusingly, is often called "capitalism", though its not really, being more of a synthesis between the thesis of 19th century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.

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

> tights (thank you Lululemon for convincing women that tights are pants, sometimes it makes walking down the street that much more enjoyable),

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.)