Robots and the world of work
Start-ups are redoubling efforts to disrupt the manufacturing process of textiles, as politicians push to bring factory jobs back to the US. Anna Nicolaou reports from New York.
Produced and edited by Gregory Bobillot. Filmed by Ben Marino, Kiran Stacey and Gregory Bobillot. Additional footage: Getty.
Transcript
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Robots have transformed production of cars and planes. But the garment industry has stayed old fashioned. For decades, companies have tried to sew clothing with a robot. But the concept has mostly remained a pipe dream.
In practise, almost all of the world's t-shirts and jeans are still made by millions of cheap workers, mostly women watching over sewing machines. The first sewing robots that have been brought to the market are expensive, running in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. With an abundance of cheap labour available in Asia, humans still make more financial sense.
But labour costs are rising in China, and political groups are campaigning to bring jobs back to the US. A new group of start-ups is now looking to upend the way clothing is made.
Technology can now replace human beings in their totality, just changing basic motor force, or basic routine mental processes, but has now the potential of, with the huge amount increase in computer power, to replace or substitute complex mental and complex intelligent processes.
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Jonathan Zornow, a software developer from Seattle, last year came up with what he thinks is the solution. He calls it the Sewbo. Unlike his predecessors, he wants to change fabric to work with robots, instead of vice versa.
He patented a process of drenching fabric in a liquid thermoplastic solution. It makes material like cotton as stiff as a board. The robot then sews, stitches, and shapes the fabric. Wash it off with warm water, and it comes back to life, as a t-shirt or a pair of jeans. With this method, he believes he's made the first fully robotic garment-- a t-shirt.
Mr. Zornow is now in talks with big retailers and manufacturers across China, India, and Sri Lanka to roll out the technology.
This is an industry that's very dependent on manual labour. And because of this, the supply chains have grown very long. They've stretched all the way around the world. I believe the average t-shirt has about 20,000 miles on it by the time it reaches the consumer, going from the cotton field, to the spinning factory, to the textile mills, to the sewing factories.
This allows people to shorten their supply chains to manufacture in a much more responsive way, and to avoid labour costs. So this is something that's been of great interest to both American retailers and brands, as well as existing manufacturers overseas.
But economists are now wondering if these technologies will threaten the entire economic model of South Asia. As Chinese workers demand higher wages, places such as Bangladesh and Pakistan are hoping that their cheap workforces will become the world's new workshop. The World Bank estimates South Asian countries will add more than one million workers each month for the next two decades.
Economists call this a demographic dividend, as populations grow and wages stay about a quarter of those in China. But if technology like the Sewbo take off, the jobs they're relying on could be eliminated for good.
So the fear is that our so-called demographic dividend could turn into a demographic nightmare, because of all the educated, aspiring young people who would be unemployed as a result of this automation ad robotisation.
The question becomes, how much time is life? Even some of the companies building the robots say it could be 20 years before they're adopted widely. This would give governments time to prepare, to retrain workers. But some economists warn that these countries should give up on manufacturing altogether, as the demographic nightmare looms. Anna Nicolaou, Financial Times, New York.
