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Toyota's Trumpet Playing Robot Showcased
fsharp writes "The New York Times has an article discussing the first public showing of Toyota's new humanoid robot. During a demonstration, the biped robot played trumpet together with a rolling robot. Most telling about the article was the whole philosophy towards R&D: 'Toyota acknowledges that it is unlikely to turn a profit building robots anytime soon, but the program highlights its engineering-oriented culture and willingness to invest in projects that may not pay off for decades.' How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?"
If the company is willing to fund Jesse Jackson, they sure don't need my dollars.
Nike put more than 15 years into the development of the shox cushioning system.
That depends entirely on your definition of "people". Apparently there has been a great deal of debate about that...
How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?
Well, Microsoft keeps funding SCO...
Ba dump bump! Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Captured By Robots
Hello all you happy people.
Japan and Western Europe have a difficult problem. They have stopped fucking for the purpose of making babies. Their population growth is extremely low: around 1.5 children per family.
What is means is that when all the currently middle aged and young people get old, they will be either consuming all the productivity generated by people who will be working at that future time, need to import millions of workers from places who don't have anything in common with their people and culture, or use robots in a highly productive way to meet the needs of the elderly.
The Japanese are gambling that they can develop way advanced robotics technology to avoid having to import millions of non-Japanese into their country to meet their future labor shortage.
I used to think that this was mean-spirited and racist, but I have changed my mind after the Madrid train bombings. The Spanish are in the same difficult position where they will need in about thirty to fifty years to import millions of people from the islamic world to meet their labor shortage, as they too have stopped making babies.
Given a choice of buying robots to meet a labor shortage and allowing millions of immigrants who most likely would like to see your culture and way-of-life destroyed in order to satisify the requirements of their disfunctional and murder-obsessed religion, anyone would chose the robots.
And if Japan makes the most advanced and versatile robots when they become needed, well then good for them for having the long-term vision and capital to invest for needs fifty years in advance.