Mass producing clothing has traditionally required a
little skill and a lot of labor. Apparel
manufacturers have responded to that fact by moving their production to
countries where cheap labor was readily available. That tactic has provided needed income to
poor nations and provided inexpensive clothing to the rest of the world. This process has been going on for
decades. Consequently, it was
interesting to note that one of China’s largest apparel producers was actually
investing in a plant to produce clothing in Arkansas for sale in the US market. It was not attracted by cheap labor in
Arkansas; rather, it was coming for the opportunity to eliminate labor. Kevin Hamlin provides background on this
activity in an article in Bloomberg
Businessweek. The article was titled
The 33ȼ T-Shirt
in the magazine version. Online it
became China Snaps Up America’s Cheap Robot Labor.
Automation can easily reproduce complex precision acts
once performed by humans. They have a
more difficult time with simpler tasks requiring a lot of hand
manipulation. The human hand is a wondrous
device and some of its actions, such as the sewing and stitching of clothing
have resisted robotic duplication. That
apparently is changing. An American
outfit called Softwear Automation is producing “sewbots.”
“It took seven years for
Softwear Automation, founded in 2007 by a group of engineers from Georgia Tech,
to introduce its first sewbot, which is capable of making bathmats and towels.
A $1.8 million grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency funded the work.”
The sewbots are not yet capable of producing all types of
clothing, but their developers believe it will just be a matter of time until
they are.
“Stitching a dress shirt with a
breast pocket requires about 78 separate steps. Tricky, but such a bot is
coming, says the chief executive officer of Softwear Automation, Palaniswamy
Rajan: ‘We will roll that out within the next five years’.”
Once you can go beyond the complexity of towels and
bathmats, the next step up in difficulty is t-shirts. That is what has attracted the Chinese.
“By early 2018, Tianyuan
Garments Co., based in the Suzhou Industrial Park in eastern China, will unveil
a $20 million factory staffed by about 330 robots from Atlanta-based Softwear
Automation Inc. The botmaker and garment company estimate the factory will
stitch about 23 million T-shirts a year. The cost per shirt, according to Pete
Santora, Softwear’s chief commercial officer: 33¢.”
This plant is expected to produce about 400 jobs in
Arkansas. It should provide even lower
cost t-shirts and keep more of our consumer dollars circulating within the US
than if the goods had been manufactured elsewhere. It becomes relatively easy to move
manufacture to the markets where the product will be sold. Those are good things. However, this development also generates some
concerns for the future.
Human labor cannot compete with that cost for producing
t-shirts. Soon other tasks will be
automated and gradually one of the most prominent paths for poor countries to
improve their economies will disappear.
Poor countries must be able to sell something in order to acquire funds
needed to purchase the components required to develop a modern society. If all a nation has to sell is cheap labor,
time is rapidly running out for it.
We in the US should also be concerned by this development.
Automation has led to the elimination of moderately-skilled jobs in
manufacturing and other occupations. Those
who have found work after losing those jobs have generally ended up in
lower-skilled occupations. As robotics
becomes more competitive an option for those positions, where might one go
next?
If nearly all work can be replicated by a machine, then
we face enormous economic changes that will require a complete rethinking of
our social contract. Clearly, someone
has to make the robots—at least until the robots decide to make themselves—so
at least some work will persist, but it is time to begin taking note of where
technology is taking us.
Alec Ross produced an interesting look at what the growth
industries of the future might be in his book The Industries of the Future.
Robotics is, of course, one of his targeted areas.
“A few
countries have already established themselves as leading robot societies. About 70 percent of total robot sales take
place in Japan, China, the United States, South Korea, and Germany—known as the
‘big five’ in robotics. Japan, the
United States, and Germany dominate the landscape in high-value industrial and
medical robots, and South Korea and China are major producers of less expensive
consumer-oriented robots. While Japan
records the highest number of robot sales, China represents the most rapidly
growing market, with sales increasing by 25 percent every year since 2005.”
Japan attracts considerable
interest because it faces a future in which it will have fewer people than
jobs, thus making advances in robotics a necessity. Much development is aimed at providing the
low-skilled labor necessary to care for their aging population. While its population is aging, its population
is also declining. There will simply not
be enough workers to care for the elderly using traditional methods.
Ross lists some of the directions
development is taking in eliminating the need for low-skilled human labor.
“Panasonic
created a 24-fingered hairwashing robot that has been tested in Japanese
salons. The robot will likely be
installed in hospitals and homes as well.
It measures the shape and size of the customer’s head and then rinses,
shampoos, conditions, and dries the customer’s hair using its self-advertized ‘advanced
scalp care’ abilities.”
“Right
now at the Manchester Airport in England, robot janitors use laser scanners and
ultrasonic detectors to navigate while cleaning floors. If the robot encounters a human obstacle, it
says in a proper English accent, ‘Excuse me, I am cleaning,’ and then navigates
around the person.”
Restaurant jobs, ever a refuge
for the marginally employed, are also at risk.
“There
is potential for robots to replace many of those waitstaff jobs over time. It’s already happening in trial forms in many
restaurants around the world. In Asia,
many countries are starting to experiment with adopting robots in their restaurants. The Hajime restaurant in Bangkok solely uses
robot waiters to take orders, serve customers, and bus tables. Similar restaurants are cropping up in Japan,
South Korea, and China. These robots,
designed by the Japanese company Motoman, are programmed to recognize an empty
plate and can even express emotion and dance to entertain customers. It’s unclear exactly how you tip for good
service.”
It is well known that pets are popular with and
beneficial to the elderly whose infirmities restrict their mobility. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a pet that couldn’t
wreck a carpet?
“….a Japanese industrial
automation company AIST has created PARO, a robot baby harp seal covered in
soft white fur. PARO exhibits many of
the same behaviors as a real pet.
Designed for those who are too frail to care for a living animal or who
live in environments that don’t allow pets, such as nursing homes, it enjoys
being held, gets angry when hit, and likes to nap. When President Barak Obama met PARO a few
years ago on a tour of Japanese robotics innovations, he instinctually reached
out and rubbed its head and back. It
looks like a cute stuffed animal, but costs $6,000 and is classified by the US
government as a class 2 medical device.”
Not many of the jobs of today may be available in the
near future. This could be an
opportunity to “live the good life” with abundant leisure to use profitably. If this is our future, then we will have to
be educated and learn how to use leisure in a way that brings
satisfaction. We cannot all be educated
to be robot builders. On the other hand,
if we proceed without planning for the future we could end up with chaos and
strife that are beyond belief.
The interested reader might find the following article
informative:
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