Back on the 15th, the BBC quoted me*, about Japan’s low-tech life (3yen).
It turns out that on same day, that Michael Fitzpatrick writing for The Independent (No. 4 in the world) also devoted two paragraphs to my thoughts on the electric dampdreams that the Japanese have for robots.
Electric dreams: Is it the end for robot development?
—We were promised a life of leisure thanks to hard-working robots and fiendishly clever cyborgs. But the android fantasy has largely been terminated, argues Michael Fitzpatrick—
Wednesday, 14 July 2010 | The Independent (UK)
For years technocrats have been touting robots as the next big revolution, so big that their importance will rival that of car production and that they will create a utopia, “an Athens without the slaves”….. . . [big snip] . . .“Without ‘consciousness’, robots are just spot welders, bolt-tightening arms, burger flippers, spray painters, and factory drones that can swivel dexterously back and forth in pre-programmed for assembly line work. They’re expensive toasters – one-trick-ponies. It will be many decades before anthropomorphic robots are going to be sentient,” says Taro Hitachi*, a Tokyo-based Japan blogger and an expert in patents. “Decades of creating fantasy robots, like Asimo, Aibo, Roborior et al, has bankrupted the research and development departments of Japan while not resulting in any viable products.”
Nor does he accept that Japan’s high robot count is a true reflection of the reality: “Japan counts almost any kind of semi-autonomous factory machinery as a ‘robot’, whereas in the rest of the world, milling machines and potato pealing machines are just factory automation.”
More…
As mentioned in The Independent, one thing that really burns me is Japan’s public policy of GROSSLY inflating Japan’s number of “employed robots” and claiming to have more working robots in the world.
I specifically know that old-fashioned routers that were pushed along a funky sheet-metal templates/stencils by compressed air to cut plastic faceplates at Hitachi Odawara Works were factiously counted as “robots.”
My grandfather, who was a master machinist at Western Electric in 1939, made the same kind of “pneumatic router jigs.” He would be greatly amused that in Japan he would be called a “roboticist” and a “production engineer.” Ninety percent of the time when I meet an “engineer” in Japan I discover they don’t have any kind of engineering degree.
Note: The artical refers to me by my pen name Taro Hitachi—a corporate ‘John Doe’—that Hitachi forced me to use on all the books and papers I wrote them because of their corporate copyright policy. Hitachi was worried that I would run away to an even higher paying job if I was a “published author” and my name was listed as one of the authors of hundreds of Hitachi books, manuals, and papers that I wrote for them.
I smell muney… should start selling tshirt “Taro Hitachi iz maye h0m3b0y”, next gaijin sweat scented candles, relaxation female massagers… smell absorbant antibacterial cat litter…
muney… muney… muney…
Several of the wannbe-robot-humping commenters on The Independent mentioned that Japanese robotics have greatly advanced the “Cause” by reducing the cost and sophistication of robot kits.
“Let’s lovedoll everyone, happy!!!
“Fair use” quotation –www.law.Cornell.edu
In order for robots to melt into the background in office or home environments, the robot has to adapt to *our* environment, not us changing around our world to fit the robots. I’m extremely picky about getting my computer set up just the way I like it, because computers should serve *me*, not the other way around. Same goes for robots. I don’t want to rebuild my home or office for the convenience of robots.
I do a lot of homebrew robotics. I, and everyone else, brings robots to club meetings in a motley assortment of tubs, bins, and cartons, and big robots go int the back of pick up trucks. — bah, how primitive. A home service robot needs to be easy to transport. That means it has to fit in my car, exactly where a human would sit, without any accommodation. It needs to get to the second floor by going up the stairs, not by some “robot service elevator” put in just for it. So I think in the end we need to have a robust bi-pedal robot platform that folds in the same places that humans do and is human scale, because the world is built to human scale and built for beings that fold where humans do. Robots will only be useful when they can operate in our world without us having to remodel the world for robots.
Bi-pedal robots aren’t worth pursuing for anthropomorphism — bi-pedal robots are worth pursuing because they could fit easily into our world and disappear into the background.
ASIMO vs PETMAN: “Japanese Robots Are A Joke!”
Sankaku Complex | Nov 8, 2011
Japanese are aghast at how pathetic their nation’s robotic poster-child ASIMO is compared to America’s new bipedal military prototype PETMAN.
For those not yet familiar with PETMAN, Boston Dynamics’ famed bipedal testbot, the video below shows how far science can progress if only a nation has the foresight to run the world’s largest weapons development programme…
VS
More...
Here’s another great example:
I have seen automatic doors being counted as “robots” at Toshiba’s Kawasaki R&D Center when the Japanese government sends their Robot Survey (census).
Luckily, here’s one company door that won’t be falsely counted as a robot—The main entrance of Japan Automatic Door Company’s Okayama Sales Office.
—See it for yourself on Google Street.
View Larger Map
____
Update:
I just figured out that the large Yokohama office of Japan Automatic Door Company also has an automatic doorknob on their front door.
I remember another country which inflated its figures like that…
Well done buddy–That’s tom terrific, funnel-shaped “thinking cap,” which also enhanced his robot intelligence.
Check out this “Y.A.U.R.”—Yet Another Useless Robot from Japan…
The-rest-of-the-story about Japan’s robot fetish: