Slashdot Mirror
Japan's Proposed 30-Year Robot Program
Gallamine writes "A group of Japanese researchers have proposed a Government plan to spend 50 billion yen per year (that's over 400 million $US) for 30 years on developing a robot with capabilities of a 5-year-old. Japan's current economy may prevent the plan from happening, but the interesting point is the parallels to the U.S. Apollo space program, America's attempt to put a man on the moon. While expensive, the benefits to the American population from that program are probably unmeasurable. Perhaps the U.S. Government should consider funding such a program over here?"
I remember the excitement in the U.S. AI community when Feigenbaum went to Japan and sold the government there on the 5th generation build-a-real-AI project.
Funny - I do not remember any animosity - mostly just wishing them good luck.
BTW, the 5th generation project was built around logic programming (Prolog variants). I have never understood why more people do not use Prolog. For an admittedly small percentage of software projects, Prolog is the best language for solving problems - well worth learning. (A very good free LGPL Prolog is available here).
-Mark
You presume that a nearly infinite amount of power is available. While it is conceivable that fusion power may one day become feasable, it still seems very far away indeed. Until the power problem is solved, there really isn't a chance that zillions of robots could be produced and deployed doing all sorts of manual labor.
Evolution created me out a pool of chemicals.
Eh, I just checked, and 50 billion Yen equal $US 423 million, not $US 400 billion.
Wow, $US400 billion every year, that would be more than 10% of their total purchasing power (quoting CIA's numbers), and about 90% of their total gross revenue (not yet calculating their expenditure). That would have been some serious fucking spending. But no, they're not spending that many dollars, it's just the story submitter's inability to do math.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
The current (8/20/2003) exchange rate is 118.015 yen to the dollar.
This isn't the first time Japan is doing one of these long term plans. I watched a program a few years back explaining that japan had several plans like this
In fact this seems to be a reccurrent fad in Japan. A long time ago (somewhere in the 80s I think) they had decided to build a "real" AI system, or more precisely (?) a "5th generation computer" - think "HAL9000".
As usual with Japan, the objective was to take up bits and pieces from everywhere in the world (MIT and Stanford's AI concepts, the French language PROLOG, etc..), and to improve on them through sheer investment and massive human work.
It is quite possible that this 5th generation computer was the biggest piece of vaporware in history.
Thomas Miconi
=============