Thanks for bringing that to my attention! Very interesting read. Those robots do sound much more advanced in terms of their dexterity. It will be interesting to see how many factories choose to invest in the upfront cost of those robots.
That article contained a very important caveat too, which is that these sewing robots will be focused on creating one type of garment: t-shirts. I think that could definitely have the potential to shift human labor, but it wouldn’t be the type of automation necessary to do what Amazon proposed. The advantage that humans have in a factory is their ability to not need to be reprogrammed when a designer decides to add a pocket or a seam.
And from a business perspective, I’m curious to see how factories view the trade-off between the opportunity of reduced labor cost and the risk of reduced flexibility. Right now, if a company pulls out of a factory, that factory doesn’t stand to lose too much money because they can rather easily shift those workers to work on different garments for a different company’s business. That could be much harder if you have to reprogram machines, or if the machines must sit idle until the right garment design comes through the door to be able to use them.
