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

[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.