Japan: Riding the Wave of the Future?

[Axandra]

I've come across this interesting article in Financial Times, about a Japanese company named Cyberdyne that "is building [...] an exoskeleton, which attaches to and amplifies the human body."

Being an avid SF reader, I can't believe my senses at the mind-boggling pace to which old tech-fantasies become reality, and it seems that Japan is still in the leading echelon when it comes to robotics.

For this thread, I'd like to skip the obvious nerd attraction, namely the enhancement of physical power ("Basically, you can pick up something weighing 40kg like this,"says Mitsuhiro Sakamoto, Cyberdyne's chief operating officer, taking his pen from the desk.), and instead ask your opinion on the potential social implications of applied robotics in Japan.

In particular, I'd like to know if you think that Japan is riding the wave of the future... in the right direction.

As a start, consider the following quote from the Financial Times article:

Rather than accept economic decline or allow large-scale immigration to supplement the decreasing population, Japan imagines an army of robot workers. - First steps into the robotics boom

 

[aquamarine]

I've read up about these guys as well. It seems like a very good idea especially for the care-taking industry as we are having more and more elderly on the govnt's payroll that are in old-folks' homes. It would certainly help the care-givers to lift them up and the such.

 

[guy]

Japan is far from the only country researching these kinds of body-augmentation robotics. The difference is that most other countries that are doing the same sort of research are for private military applications (go figure).

My gut instinct is indeed to correlate this to the problem of Japan's declining birthrate, a substantial domestic workforce on the verge of retirement, and inability to attract and retain foreign workforce to counter it. But without any formal research I'll just leave it as-is for consideration -- I do not want to side with the FT "army of robot workers" quotation, since it hinges on causation (the idea that low birthrate and poor labor = more robots). In deciding whether this move is "good" or "bad", it's difficult to tell whether advanced robotics research is a true remedy or merely treating the symptoms. Japan has in fact done all kinds of robotics for several decades, while recognition of the population/labor problem is only recent.

Japan has other industries in which it has a palpable lead. Solar panels are a hot topic, but building them is expensive. Toshiba came up with a solar panel factory, itself covered in solar panels capable of powering the factory's energy requirements -- effectively a self-powered factory (aside from the cost of raw materials). The Toyota Prius is a popular car among "eco-heads", but the reality is that the vast emissions from constructing the inefficient batteries negate the fuel savings altogether. Honda meanwhile has released the Clarity, the first production car based on hydrogen fuel, which is miles more efficient than the Prius. Harvesting hydrogen is still a costly business, but it's not hard to imagine that some of these companies could put their heads together and come up with a world-changing solution.

I know talking about the energy crisis is passé -- robotics is the stuff of sci-fi and so much more interesting. But honestly it's not something that will affect very many people directly in the next 20 years. On the other hand, solving the problem of how to ween ourselves off of oil and onto healthier abundant or renewable energies will make a far greater impact on the world. And that's one thing Japan is doing while most other countries are still arguing about it.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

If the population is dwindling, people are happy to have robot workers. If the population swells, people get angry with robot workers.

You could delete the words "robot workers" and replace them with "immigrant workers" and it'd be the same exact situation we already have today. Nobody complained when Mexicans came up to work in America when food was a-plenty, money was a-plenty, and menial labor was in high demand but short supply. Now that money's scarce and so are the jobs, a lot of people are looking to do menial work, and they feel crowded out by the immigrants. Putting aside whether the immigrants should be there in the first place or not, all I'm saying is, it isn't human nature to bitch about somebody stealing a job unless it's your job. And the same thing is true for robotics.

People are happy to have robots in the auto industry because they don't work there, and they don't sympathize with the human laborers who are (admittedly) much too inefficient. So those guys lose their jobs, and find themselves S.O.L. at the game of life.

Japan is happy to have robot caretakers for the reasons aqua listed. Right now, there are too many human elderly and too few human caretakers. Robots fix the problem.

The ethical dilemma only arises when the population reswells. At that point, there are two hurdles to overcome:
(1) how do you make the companies re-employ human laborers when the robots do the same jobs much more efficiently? (i.e. they save the company/government money)

(2) supposing a sci-fi scenario where robots have consciousness, how do you justify shutting a robot down and not putting a man down? Why put the man on Welfare? Why not just put him down? That's one less drain on the system, right? And if you don't consign to put men down, but you want to put robots down, then (Terminator et al horror scenarios). And if you refuse to put either the robots or the men down, then you've only made the situation worse.


#2 is theoretically easy to deal with: make absolutely certain that the robots are kept very, very primitive so that there's no ethical concerns about shutting them down once they've outlived their usefulness. But #1 ... well, that's an obstacle that I don't know if humanity can overcome so easily, if at all. The only way to solve #1 is to answer this question: how do we create a society where human beings are provided for and they no longer have to work?

Because I guarantee you that we're fast approaching an era where McDonald's drive-thru boys will be replaced by automated robot arms and receivers, where lawyers will simply be Deep Blue-like computers which analyze the law looking for strategies by which to convince a jury their case is the correct one, and where even surgeons will be replaced by advanced robots.

The only job a robot (for now) isn't threatening is a job which requires human ingenuity. Any menial task can be done by a robot. Surgeons are just knife-wielders (ultimately). They know a fuckload of knowledge. But so does a robot with a medical database inside of him. Lawyers are just speakers which output recorded laws to their audience. Cooks are just arms and legs which move about the kitchen dumping stuff in and out of various pots and pans at various intervals of time in order to create what is called "a meal." A robot can do any of these things.

So yes. We've got to figure out, as a society, how the fuck we will survive in a world where there is no longer any human accountability as far as holding a job is concerned. A world where 99% of the human population is unemployed. How will we make this work? Because it really can't be avoided. It is coming.

 

[guy]

Good points overall, though I personally don't think we need to be overly dramatic about an inevitable overlord robotic working class.

I'm not gonna argue about the general stuff, I'll just put out a few thoughts about Japan specifically. Japan's working class is aging and exhausted. It's not merely a slowing population growth. It's that for the last few decades (and still ongoing), the average salaryman has worked 8am to 10pm, 6 days a week, only taking vacation for the winter holidays. The corporate ladder is tiny: If you haven't been promoted by the time you turn 40, that's the job you'll be stuck with for the rest of your life. It's great for the company, but you will run yourself right into the grave.

Robots are a godsend to the workforce, but realistically I imagine that they would only tasked with menial labor -- namely, the 5-6 hours-per-day wasted on making copies, faxing memos, sorting files, etc. That way the salaryman can claim a more civilized 9-to-5 workday while the company doesn't lose productivity. After all, there are a lot of non-mechanical things robots simply can't do because they lack the human touch. For a company to replace its entire workforce with robots would be a net loss, so the trick is to find a balance of both.

That said, Japan has every reason to build a robotic workforce because frankly, it needs to step up its consumer product industries; and with very limited landmass compared to China, Japanese companies do need to maximize production capacity. The aforementioned self-powered solar panel factory is just one example of how technology can be integrated with human administration, augmenting the human component but not replacing it.



I'd also want to mention that compared to Japan's bubble days of the 80's and 90's, Japan is riding a large cultural boom based on IP (intellectual property) instead of consumer electronics. Because Japanese culture, or at least a part of it, is the reason why any of us are here at AO. Great manga and anime artists and novelists are a part of what keeps Japan popular in the 21st century, and those simply can't be replaced by robots. Same with research doctors looking for disease cures, public workers that improve social codes, chefs that dream up recipes, etc. Ideally speaking, no one gets replaced by a robot; instead everyone just goes up a notch.

 

[ShanksYYZ]

In 50 years when there's no Japanese people left, robots will run the country. True automation

 

[aquamarine]

Yea, all the Japanese will have died off and it will be the next version of Canada, nothing but a never-endlng supply of immigrants, haha

 

[Axandra]

@ guy & Sakunyuusha: I've greatly enjoyed your posts, where you bring into discussion the necessity and/or inevitability of employing next generation robotics in the work force in the near future, as well as the seemingly unavoidable ethical angle of doing it.

My personal take on the question that makes the title of this thread is that we are witnessing nothing more than a natural, evolutionary step forward which - if we don't blow ourselves up in the meantime - all societies will ultimately consider taking it as well. There's just too much obvious advantage to be derived from this kind of technology. On the other hand, like all progress, it is expectable that this one too face its fair share of innate fear and opposition, abuse and misuse.

While human augmentation is nothing new (a pair of ordinary reading glasses is nothing less in scope and methods), population inertia to the newer kind of applied technology discussed here is still strong; and here's where I'm glad that Japanese appear to be one of the most inquisitive people on the globe. A convergence of socio-economical factors (e.g. negative population growth, rather limited natural resources) and the courage to face them might just prove incentive enough to get the ball rolling in this field of robotics, even if at first it's only for menial jobs. Gotta start somewhere.

Naturally, some of us will be happy with this progress and some of us won't. Personally, I think that sometime, after some unavoidable struggle, a certain balance will be achieved. Until then, I'm happy for the steps science is taking forward (real world results are still open to appreciation) and, wish I had the money for an ASIMO.

 

[guy]

If you're worried about repercussions on society, you can step back and look at it more fundamentally: Why is it that we are so insistent on making robots look like a human? What edict is there that says that robots should walk on too legs, have too arms, a head, fingers, be able to communicate intelligibly, etc?

And of course the answer is because we are obsessed with trying to deconstruct ourselves (ie: being able to build a robot with perfect human likeness means that we would understand everything about how the human body moves, how the brain thinks, how one "life" interacts with another, etc), in an attempt to understand our existence. It's the age-old "why are we here" question. Or more bluntly, it's us trying to play God -- creating children in our own likeness.

Of course the question therein is, what happens once we do create a robot with perfect human likeness, such that they can seemlessly integrate with society? Do we then continue to treat them discriminately as robots, or have they suddenly have rights, feelings, souls? How does that reshape society, and is it for better or for worse?

These are the questions of sci-fi films like Blade Runner, Brazil, A.I. and I Robot (to an extent), shows like Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 series), animes like Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion (to an extent), and much more.

I personally think it would be naive to say that we are capable of deciding when we've reached a good, technological balance. As long as there are unanswered questions, humanity will continue to explore the unknown (the current apex of which is understanding our "souls"), and because of its nature we won't know if we've gone too far until it's already too late.

 

[Axandra]

Why is it that we are so insistent on making robots look like a human? What edict is there that says that robots should walk on too legs, have too arms, a head, fingers, be able to communicate intelligibly, etc?

And of course the answer is because we are obsessed with trying to deconstruct ourselves [...] in an attempt to understand our existence. It's the age-old "why are we here" question. Or more bluntly, it's us trying to play God -- creating children in our own likeness.

If we're talking about futuristic robots, the asimovian ones then yes, that's one valid answer indeed, but I really wouldn't take it as the default one, as in "of course". More to the point, I tend to think that plain human pragmatism plays a more pronounced role in choices like humanoid shapes and communication: after all, we're interested in integrating robots in our society in one way or another.

Furthermore, I suspect that building (or fantasizing about) humanoid-shaped robots has less to do with "what is human?" and playing god - this particular avenue of inquiry is rather inefficient -, and more to do with finding a method to get something for very little, if not nothing. I might come out as a cynic by saying it, but I'll call this a quest for the perfect socially and morally acceptable... slavery.

 

[Groper_love]

Destroy all the robots, and have the government change working times to 9am - 5pm.

Everyone will be happy and will be a winner.