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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 have to wonder how they define a 5 year old and to what context? Ability to learn, reason, think interact. Also what about physical appeareance are they looking for same size or something the size of a fully grown human?
Could it get to the point where you have a "child" in a super human body? Hopefully they will have Asimovs Rules in there at least
Rus
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I'm a bit uncomfortable with the concept of building life, even artificial life such as this. Who is to say that we would hold the same degree of ethical concern for something we can build in a factory as we do for life, or that these robot lives won't be held in less esteem than our own? Perhaps we should leave playing God in the hands of our creator?
$7.5B wouldn't fund NASA for 6 months, much less colonize the moon.
The difference being that we can see the moon. Since we can see it, it was easy to suppose that there must be a way to get there if we only tried hard enough. But in the field of AI it's quite a different story. AI research is 60 years old now and the best we can do is emulate the intelligence of a cockroach. We're nowhere near building a robot that can simulate the intelligence of a 5 year old human. In fact, it may very well be impossible. (Personally, I believe that an intelligent digital computer will never be possible.) If that is the case then spending millions or even billions won't make much of a difference. Granted, even if the project fails a lot of new and useful technology will be created in the process. But overall I think I'd be more excited to hear that the US is going to commit to landing on Mars by 200x.
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Two words: Slave Labor. Robots don't threaten to walk out if working conditions are dangerous.
Don't trust any concentration of power.
Don't get me wrong, I still love research for research's sake, but I think that Japan could better spend $50 billion on more advanced urban architecture and transportation.
Why don't you go visit Japan? That way you will have a decent understanding of the way life is both in Tokyo and outside of Tokyo.
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This is basically the same argument that were used when the industrial revolution began and machines started to replace people.
Come to think of it the argument was popular in the 60's and 70's with application to computers and how they would displace so many workers.
IMHO the argument is just as erronous now as it ever has been.
Yeah, pays off, but for who? Everyone else just ends up copying the technology created and get into the market a bit later without spending as much money on R&D!
Berto
I googled for some information and came up with this site.
Here are some relevant quotes:
Housing is a particularly severe problem. The quality built into a modern home is good, but cost and size are a different matter. With the rapid appreciation of land values in the 1980s in Japan, a four-bedroom, ranch-style, North American house on an acre of land and valued at maybe US$250,000 would have cost many millions in Tokyo. The most that people could hope for would be a 3DK (3 bedrooms, a dining room and a kitchen plus, of course, a bath, bathroom and entryway) squeezed into, perhaps, 700 square feet. But the price was so high that banks were beginning to write 60-year '3-generation' mortgages which would be finally paid off by the grandson of the signer. With prices at such a level, inheritance was a problem. The tax on inheritances ran to 70% at the top end and, with many homes valued toward a million dollars, most salarymen were forced into deep debt or would have to sell the family home to pay the tax.
In the early 1970s, pollution was a problem, especially in large cities like Tokyo. Policemen were provided with oxygen if they had to direct traffic at a busy intersection and smog alerts rose from 16 a year in 1960 to 150 a year in 1970: school children and those with breathing problems were advised not to go outside on those days. To a large extent, air pollution has been solved and from time to time Tokyo's residents can even see Mt. Fuji once again.
What has not been solved is commuting. Even if the commuters' ribs are not broken, the time spent on public transport has increased from about 60 minutes in 1960 to and average of 90 minutes. The time spent is a serious degradation of the quality of life, even if the trains run exactly on time, are air conditioned, and have stock quotations and weather forecasts on LCD monitors at each door.
As the economy has grown, pressures have increased to deal with questions of living conditions and the quality of life. Pollution has been reduced and more households are connected to the sewer system in the cities, but there is pressure on local and national governments to invest more to improve living conditions. Local governments especially have been responsive, but the national government controls the bulk of public money and therefore long-term improvement depends on it.
The unofficial
It's not really possible in the US. I recently saw a documentary about the progress in the robotics and it contained one explanation why quasi-androids are being so expensivelly developed in Japan and not in the US.
Basically Japan is a closed country with its population getting older every day which makes the workforce very expensive there today and even more expensive in future.
US on the other hand is still a country open for immigrants with hordes of young people from all over the world willing to work for food. Or even cheaper. And if it's still too expensive US outsources the work to the third world countries.
There's no place for robots in US economy.
rrw
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Seriously, what you're describing sounds like an end to scarcity, for the basics at least, and that doesn't sound too bad.
See what I've been reading.
Nice essay, but I think you are mistaken in one key area -- the fact that for *any* robot to be able to take effective orders from humans it must also be sentient and self-aware. The reason self-awareness evolved in humans in the first place was so they could "put themselves in other's shoes", so to speak. Believe me, robots that don't get the complex nuances of human social behavior will be utterly useless for any job where human interaction (beyond what an ATM currently does) is required.
Just my $0.02
Once we have these machines, we can turn them to the challenge of pacifying, feeding, and teaching the world.
Not to say we shouldn't stop our current efforts, but doesn't it seem logical that with an army of never-tiring robots to do our bidding, the jobs of policing, feeding, and educating would be that much easier to perform?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
50 billion is not "a quarter billion $US", unless you use your own definition of a quarter. It's actually more like 423 million $US or 381 million Euro*.
* - Sorry, fucked up Slashcode doesn't support "advanced" non-ASCII characters, like a euro symbol.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
at $20,000 to $40,000 it wouldn't be time to get a new one if they broke. It's too cost prohibitive. And if you work in IT, (since you are posting on slashdot, you probably do) you know no matter how well you program/design something, it can break. Now, say you have a company which employees 20 robots a year @20k each (the low end number). Wouldn't it make sense to hire a human at 40k a year if the human can fix 5 of the robots? (Assuming %25 percent of them have a problem during the year). That is a new job right there. Companies would probably hire 2 of them per 20 robots, just to be efficent. You will want a repair man around at all times, at least to turn a new robot on and remove the old one.
On top of that, A whole industry would be born for creating and teaching these robots. Who is going to teach the robots how to make those Big Macs? You will probably end up with the burger flippers being consultants to mcdonalds to work with the programmers to come up with the best burger flipping algorithms. It will take an army of tech support people, programmers and quality control people to maintain the robots. Sure, maybe you could argue for robots repairing other robots but that is a bit risky..and not really blue collor work.
Are you really going to trust the robots to fix other robots? Say Medical Robot (MR) has an error in his code and goes to fix coffee bean picking robot(CBPR) even though CBPR is fine. MR tears him a new one and he is broke. Say MR goes on a rampage and kills your whole farm of 50 robots. $100K loss @20k per robot. Then what? Sue Microsoft or whoever is making the robots?
Assuming the robots can fix each others software problems takes them out of the realm of non-critical thinkers(blue collar).
Yes, but the US already has weapons that can render computers useless. (EMP based?) I would figure that other countries do also. If they don't, and the robots came around I'm sure they would build them very quick. :) I like the idea of bloodless war though.
Yes, but most of the money made in major companies is by upper management. They still have to make the money for buying the expensive robots. People still have to manage the food markets, Manage the food companies, Distribute the food, etc. Getting rid of low labor jobs wouldn't bring prices down significantly. Now if you had a CEO/Manager robot who sat around all day and stole investors money....let me stop..I
No, the robotic revolution will simply force humans into jobs that the machines can't do. Does that mean that only 5% of the population will have a job? No, I doubt it. What if all 6 billion of us did those jobs, with the robots doing everything else? How much more would we be capable of as a planet?
Imagine telling someone from a pre-industrial society about the Apollo program. They would likely not be able to understand how such a program was carried out, and not just because of the tech.
I think robots will be one more step towards freeing humanity to do what it wants, rather than simply working to survive. This doesn't mean retreating into art, etc, it means doing all the things that we want to do but that are currently considered prohibitively expensive, like a moon shot was before the modern era (yes, yes it was technically impossible too, but ignore that).
Of course, no one can really predict the future. I could easily be wrong.
Not to rub on a fine point but a Yen is about a penny. US$400B would require about Y47 TRILLION on today's market. The point the article is attempting to make: that Japan is making an equivalent investment as the USA did with Apollo. That implies percent of GDP. 1960's Japan cannot remotely be compared to 1960's USA in terms of economic capacity, so more than exchange rate must be used. How about adjusting that 1969 exchange rate in terms of real GDP? Hell, in 1965 the US economy was about $3T, making the $19B budget for Apollo about .6% of GDP. That same portion in 2003 terms would be about $70B. Apollo lasted 9 years averaging about $2.2B per year, or, in 2003 terms, roughly $7B per year, or about Y826B per year. This program at Y50B per year over 30 years would be about Y1.5T total. If compacted down from 30 to 9 years, like Apollo, this would still only be Y450B -- about half. The $12.7B this project will cost in 2003 dollars would be about $3.5B in 1969, or ~.1% of GDP in either year -- one-sixth the investment in Apollo in terms of percent of GDP and still just over half in terms of total dollars unadjusted for over 30 years of inflation. Still f'ing huge, but nowhere near Apollo.
Yes, then forget about the robots and colonize the moon or Mars.
Though lets start with a REAL space station first.
Actually, lets start with a more dependable heavy payload launch vehicle.
Three seperate posts, saying in effect, "Who cares what we spend the money on, as long as the government spends, spends, SPENDS!"
I, personally, agree with the spirit of the first poster who reccomends that we "worry about the robots after we figure out how to pay back our debt." (Although, it does look like Krisp wants to spend money on state-sponsored "education" - you have to have gone through a US public school to appreciate the irony in that.) And that's currently modded funny?
It's my money. Is it so wrong to let me keep it?
Carthago delenda est!
You're assuming that the wealth generated by all these robots will be used to provide universal welfare at a comfortable standard for everybody. That isn't how it has worked in the past, with the order-of-magnitude increases in efficiency brought by Taylorization etc.
Instead, the wealthiest 10% will reap the rewards, living in unimaginable luxury in secure compounds tended and protected by robots, and the other 90% of humanity will be left to fend for themselves in an economy with no employment opportunities for humans.
It's not the money that's important.
It's the people.
Invest in smart people solving specific hard problems, and you'll have a lot of smart people able to solve other generally hard problems.
I believe copying technology is actually a lot like copying in exams: you get a short-term gratification, but you lose long-term abilities.
Working for necessity's mother.