Robot revolution stymied by defective consumers

[james_davis_nicoll]

Current cohort of elderly Japanese don't want robots.

Of course, the people who will make up the elderly by the mid-point of the century aren't the current cohort of elderly, who presumably were young back in the 20s or 30s. Arbitrarily defining "elderly" as 70, the 2050 elderly will be about 20 now and I wonder what that group thinks of robots.

nicked from sclerotic_rings

Comments

[zarq.livejournal.com]

...I wonder what that group thinks of robots.

My guess would be that they see them as either:

* Machines for Will Smith to shoot at
* Alien cars and trucks that can come to life.
* Cylons
or, once The Sarah Connor Chronicles comes out on Fox in January:
* That chick from Firefly and Serenity

:D

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Very North American view.

Based on Ghost in the Shell and associated anime and manga, if medical care of the future doesn't involve Hawt Android Nurses, many people will be disappointed.

[traviswells.livejournal.com]

But then there's the other side of the coin, where they realize these Hawt Android Nurses are going to be seven stories tall and either defending Tokyo (badly*) or destroying it.

*And then you turn into Tang!

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Roujin Z, anyone?

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Very North American view.

True. But I didn't think anyone would get this reference. :)

Hawt Android Nurses

This country has a serious Frankenstein complex. I'm not sure Americans would be capable of getting past it even if the 'droids bring the hawtness.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

This happens to be a factor in current Japanese-Filipino economic talks. The Japanese elderly, not being Greg Egan, prefer the company of humans to robots and artificial intelligences, especially with regards to their medical care. The Philippines, with its significantly younger population, produces medical and eldercare professionals for export -- it's a government-mandated labor policy -- and Joe Pinoy couldn't care less about the unpleasantness in the 1940s.

The barrier is mainly, but not wholly, nativist Japanese labor worries.

What the Japanese Generation Awesome will think of eldercare robots in 2050 is anyone's guess.

[(Anonymous)]

I recall an article in which some Japanese pundit was saying (re the shrinking population problem and the immigrant option) that Japan would rather decline economically than be polluted by foreigners, or words to that effect. Which segments of the Japanese population was he talking for?

Bruce

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

The basement wingnut Bircher set, the same group that the PM always has to pander to with the whalemeat crap, the Yasukuni Shrine, et cetera.

I think you can think of appropriate analogies to American politics during our recent flirtation with a one-party state.

[(Anonymous)]

I was thinking "what are the odds for these people becoming less influencial in the future", which should have some influence on the robots-vs-foreign devils debate. I'd like to imagine Japan of the 2050's as a magnet for immigrants...

Bruce

[(Anonymous)]

While the Japanese have their share of wingnuts, at least for the moment the political right seems to be in a meltdown. My impression is that the country will open gradually for immigration. (Not that I talked too much with my colleagues about politics, so that is just one biased datapoint.)

Andreas Morlok

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

the current cohort of elderly, who presumably were young back in the 20s or 30s

You do mean born, don't you? Someone born in 1930 is 77 now.

Anyway, when I read the article, I can't see any purpose for anything except the teakettle that sends email. None of them solve the real problems old folks have. Old folks -- those that have old-folks problems -- lose muscle tone, sensory acuity, coordination, and some mental agility (even the ones who don't, relatively, do, some: it's harder to fetch data and process it because the brain attic is full and harder to search, and also the synapses have been being battered on for so long). So if an old person has problems, they need help with doing things and getting around. The social problem of losing touch with your friends because they're dead or incapacitated is best solved by having somebody there a lot: thus, human companionship and human aid is much more valuable to an old person than a robot.

There are better uses for robots (I love robots, myself, and I wouldn't use any of the robots described in the article).

[mr-mediocre.livejournal.com]

>> the current cohort of elderly, who presumably were young back in the 20s or 30s

>You do mean born, don't you? Someone born in 1930 is 77 now.

Well, most people are young for several years after being born.



(Please don't be offended, I just felt the joke had to be made.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

No offense: I noticed the same thing as soon as I posted, and I decided that James must have meant that kind of young, or was being James, one or the other, or both. But I left it because I think it's surprising somtimes that so much time has passed since (insert favorite early/mid 20th century icon here, I couldn't choose).

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

A telling sentence: ""They are costly to create, require supervision to use, and in the end the manpower issue is not solved. We can see things work, but who is going to pay the expense?"

A big part of the problem seems to be that these devices are overdesigned (a pink robot dog that monitors blood sugar, for instance) and they just don't work well enough, yet, to serve any useful purpose.. at least not as robots. I guess you can't just pop a cheery plastic robot head on any old appliance and expect people to react emotionally to it, which, from what I understand, is part of the intended purpose for this market.

Stuffed animals are better, I guess, at least for now.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I wondered if one of those rejected robots might have done better had it, itself, been covered in fuzz.

-- 10 out of 10 baby monkeys prefer the fake mother which is fuzzy *and* has the milk bottle.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

The alternative to robots is immigration and I suspect that would be more unpopular, even if done on some kind of Saudi-style non-citizen basis.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

It's already happening. Setting aside the "traditional" groups of Chinese and Koreans, and back-migration of Japanese descendants, there are at least a quarter million Filipinos in Japan already, and also Vietnamese, Thai, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Latin American and even African workers. (The latter typically get the night shifts, as not to offend local sensibilities. Oy.)

There's a demographic problem with the Japanese pension system caused by the unforeseen ratio of the elderly to active workers. If Japan doesn't let them in, bad things will happen to the system (unlike the fear-mongering demographic analysis promoted by the opponents of Social Security in the U.S.).

I suppose the Japanese state could write off their elderly over nativism. Japan's governmental social safety net is among the least developed in the First World.

What seems more likely, however, is that Japan will allow in more legal immigrants, look the other way at illegal immigrants, and then try to write most of them off as effective non-citizens -- most likely using Japanese language skills and Asian heritage as the markers. Which will make Japanese politics even more interesting.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I remember watching a PBS special on world demographics, where they pointed out that Japan has a rapidly graying population and that much of the sub-Saharan African population is children. That made me wonder, half-seriously, how effective a mass adoption program would be. Not very, probably, for all sorts of reasons.

[(Anonymous)]

Japanese fertility is rockbottom due to screwed up gender politics / sociology. Basically, due to "conservative" social norms women can have carrers, but mothers cant - once you have childern there is a stong expectation that you should dedicate heart and soul to sacred motherhood, while men are still expected to dedicate same to the company when fathers. and since japanese women arent stupid, they say screw that and stay single, or at least childless, in really large numbers, as being an office lady may not be the most satisfactory life possible, but it beats being a housewife.
The only robot solutions to that problem is the robot citizen (it pays taxes, and can be raised in a foundry!) or the robot nanny. both of which require full AI..

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I'm not disagreeing, but Japan is far from the only country to experience a sharp drop in its fertility rate, which perhaps makes Japan-centric cultural explanations a little too specific. There's little expectation of sacred motherhood or a life of corporate dedication in modern Italy or Spain, which have fertility rates even lower than Japan. And some places which did level off have rebounded, like Denmark, where the (enormous) perambulators are crowding out the bicycles from the local trains.

If I had to guess, watching Japanese culture from afar, I'd expect a rash of panicky late-30something women trying desperately to have kids, and getting very angry with the status quo of gender relations in the process. The artificial conservatism of postwar Japan is, after all, artificial.

(Curious factoid: current projections for Filipino TFR aren't expected to fall below replacement level. Period. Even professional Filipina women, when polled, express the desire to have closer to three kids than to two -- and they do. And it's a country that takes motherhood very seriously.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Finland is pursuing that strategy by bringing in African refugees. There are serious problems with their program, but it looks like the thing they're really planning on is integrating the children of the refugees as Finns.

It's almost the strategy I think all of the greying developed countries should adopt. My version would be borders completely open to human beings, citizenship for anybody who learns a modicum of local law, history, language, and culture, and multiple -- not just dual -- citizenship for anybody who wants it. There are other things in my version that are not relevant here. But the point is: it always happens, sooner or later, that the people who call themselves a particular nationality are no longer very much like the people who called themselves that in the past. Either culture change, or migration, or some combination, changes the nation over time. We honor the old version of the nation in history books and glorious full-color epics with gorgeous soundtracks. That's all that's necessary. The color of skin and preferred table condiments of the current population is not important.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

The robots in that article aren't actually all that useful. I think the lifting robots for nursing homes will be quite appreciated. When I couldn't move during the second renal failure, I was dropped by staff at least once a week.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That's the kind of thing I was thinking. The problems that they were looking at solving were all social problems at base. There are real physical problems that machinery can help with. There are other things that telemetry can help with. Human problems can really best be solved by using people.

[yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Interesting question; we've discussed whether the customers will accept robots, but what about the workers? Even if there's a significant labour shortage that drives up wages, the impression of "Robots! Taking our jobs!" might be hard to overcome.

Although, Japan is not known for a suspicion of automation. Perhaps framing them as an alternative to "Immigrants! Taking our jobs!" helps...it's also possible, given that a major application would be lifting patients on and off beds (i.e. the main part of the job that gives you a bad back), that something like the ILWU in the late 60s might happen; they started filing grievances to demand *more* forklifts and other implements of destruction.