Industrialization of clothing meant the amount of labor required to create clothing dropped drastically
Those jobs just moved to Bangladesh. I think they are just as inefficient as always. But the west traded textile jobs for other forms of service industries and more complex manufacturing.
No one makes clothing inside a western country as cheaply as they do in Asia, but the conditions in Asia are not heavily automated. They just have more people and an economies at a stage where that sort of work will provide.
I suspect we'll just make more software. You still have to think and there's an upper limit to how much you can automate, and how costly that last jump from some automation to full automation will take.
To clarify, in my metaphor I am comparing the efficiency of labor before and after the industrial revolution. Bangladesh is an industrialized country, so I am not sure I understand your point.
To weave enough cloth to make a single shirt by hand takes orders of magnitude more time than it takes for a loom to produce the same amount of cloth. This is true regardless of what country it happens in and how much the person operating the loom is paid. Yes, the cheap clothes one can buy at H&M, Uniqlo, or Gap are made in Southeast Asia, usually by workers being paid inhumanely low wages. But those clothes are universally made with fabric that is produced by looms and other modern machinery.
My point is just that the volume of clothes produced today (in southeast Asia, for example) would require orders of magnitude more workers to produce in a pre-industrial world.
Despite this massive efficiency jump, there are not less jobs in clothing and fashion related industries; there are more because we wear so much more clothes than we used to.
And what happens when Bangladesh (then Pakistan, then Ethiopia, then etc.) becomes developed enough? Eventually you run out of countries and regions to offshore to.
Those jobs just moved to Bangladesh. I think they are just as inefficient as always. But the west traded textile jobs for other forms of service industries and more complex manufacturing. No one makes clothing inside a western country as cheaply as they do in Asia, but the conditions in Asia are not heavily automated. They just have more people and an economies at a stage where that sort of work will provide.
I suspect we'll just make more software. You still have to think and there's an upper limit to how much you can automate, and how costly that last jump from some automation to full automation will take.