Yesterday I watched Bernadette Banner visit a Loom Museum and try them out for herself. A few takeaways:
1. Looms were a serious physical workout, and could honestly be hard on one's body
2. The mechanical looms they operated were pre-electric, pre-industrial, but still incredibly complex and amazingly fast compared to previous iterations
3. The operators of looms, living in abject poverty, took these jobs so that they could eat and support their families, and incidentally became the top experts on weaving cloth during their lifetimes, which all basically collapsed when looms were automated and mechanized.
All of it - the car, the iPhone, the healthcare, the indoor plumbing, the air conditioner, the closet full of clothes - is only possible because of automation.
India does produce a lot of cloth, it's true. "the only industry in the country that has generated large-scale employment for both skilled and unskilled labour", says Wikipedia. So they're quite well industrialized for textiles specifically. I'm not sure where this leaves the argument, I'll assume it means you're both wrong.
Perhaps. On the other hand, the limiting factor for automation was never human labor, it was energy input. We went all-in on oil extraction and transformed it into energy and plastics and crops, to push the human population to 10x its size. Ironically, doing so multiplied the absolute number of people living in abject poverty.
1. Looms were a serious physical workout, and could honestly be hard on one's body
2. The mechanical looms they operated were pre-electric, pre-industrial, but still incredibly complex and amazingly fast compared to previous iterations
3. The operators of looms, living in abject poverty, took these jobs so that they could eat and support their families, and incidentally became the top experts on weaving cloth during their lifetimes, which all basically collapsed when looms were automated and mechanized.