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The Japanese And Their Robots
from the robotic-everything dept
I see lots of stories going around today about the new effort in Japan to build a humanoid robot with "mental, physical and emotional capacity of a 5-year-old human." They're trying to get lots of cash from the government to work on the project, and hope that it will promote technology advances in Japan. Meanwhile, some other researchers are working on the (in comparison) much more mundane task of building a robot suit to help people who are old or disabled be able to walk with assisted help from the suit. Forget the iBot, I want a robotic suit.
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Immigrants vs. Robots
Advanced nations all have problems with aging populations. The USA and a few other Western nations are resolving this problem through importing more immigrants. There are pros and cons to this, in which immigrants provide cheap labor and maybe new inspirations, but also bring their problems with them and drain the assets of their country of origin. For the USA, it provides an economic disincentive for automation, in which the dirty/dangerous jobs done by immigrants persist longer, creating its own social problems. If the USA invested more in automated strawberry harvesting, we would have had no Cesar Chavez.
For the Japanese, who are surrounded by lower-wage nations, whose nation was not designed for the sake of immigrants, their survival is at stake in designing robots that can do a better job than cheap labor.
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Re: Immigrants vs. Robots
and when everything is automated & Cesar Chavez is no longer employable how will people pay for automation ?
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