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Comment by gibagger | Hacker News Reader

A low quality fabric makes the fashion police come and arrest you.

Low quality software kills people.

Safety critical (will kill someone if not bug free) code makes up <1% of what's shipped, safety clothes which must be of high quality else risk harm to someone make up a similarly small percent

Both will stay manual / require high level of review they're not what's being disrupted (at-least in near term) - it's the rest.

Nearly all clothing is still produced in an extremely manual process.

What was automated was the production of raw cloth.

This is a distinction without a difference. Even if you take a rudimentary raw cloth comparison like cotton vs heavy wool (the latter being fire resistant and used historically used by firemen, ie. “Safety critical”), the machines’ output quality was significantly lower than manual output for the latter.

This phenomenon is a general one… chainsaws vs hand saws, bread slicers vs hand slicing, mechanical harvesters vs manual harvesting, etc.

That’s just not the general case at all. Automated or “powered” processes generally lead to a more consistent final product. In many cases the quality is just better than what can be done by hand.

There are many corporate nightmare level scenarios out there. There is no need to reach loss of life situations to make my point.

A large enough GDPR or SOX violation is the boogeyman that CEO's see in their nightmares.

Have plenty of people, quite literally worth less than most material goods (evident from current social positions and continued trajectories) so why would companies care if it makes more money overall? Our lives have a value and in general its insultingly low.

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