Slashdot Mirror
Toyota to Employ Advanced Robots
olegalexandrov writes "Toyota Motor will introduce robots which can work as well or better than humans at all 12 of its factories in Japan to cut costs and deal with a looming labor shortage. The robots would be able to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously with their two arms, achieving efficiency unseen in human workers and matching the cheap wages of Chinese laborers, a report said on Thursday." The Motley Fool has a humorous take, and Toyota emphasizes that goodlife, err, humans will continue to have a place in Toyota factories.
I think that just for my sake, and for the sake of all my fellow Star Wars fans, we should just start calling them Droids.
The robots will be commenting on Slashdot too! Maybe then the editing will be consistant...
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
Pushing AND shoving are the answer. Toyota will protect you from the terrible secret of space.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
So to compete, the Chinese just have to lower the wages that they pay their laborers. They've done it before.
Labor shortage? How about outsourcing (insourcing?) some of those jobs to Detroit where there are surplus autoworkers?
Keep your eye on that one robot near the corner... he keeps mumbling something about Sarah Conner.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
TEHY TOOK OUR JOBS!!1111111
"...with humanoid robots jamming in a brass ensemble and performing hip-hop."
robot1: "you got e-served"
robot2: "oh, it's (ON)/OFF"
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
Yes. In Japan the population is expected to do just that.
2^5
It'll be difficult for a labor organizers to organize these robots. But I'll bet it'll also be difficult to get them to act as good consumers.
If by looming labor shortage they mean layoffs, then yes a looming labor shortage will come. Good thing these robots are around. I mean how is a company supposed to layoff workers and get work done at the same stuff. Trully inovative on their part. I for one salute our new robot overlords, while the people in Russia have a robot shortage.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
I for one, welcome our new two-armed manufacturing robotic friends.
All kidding aside, technological advancements not only displace jobs, but also create them as well. There is a small difference between paying 20 robotics engineers to develop, create, and maintain the robots exorbitant salaries as much as hiring 150 "guys off the street" to do the same stuff.
Yes, after the initial development, the costs go down, but not a whole lot. Someone needs to make sure the robots keep doing their jobs.
From TFA:
Japan has so far rejected calls to open up to large numbers of unskilled immigrants, fearing the effects on the country's social framework.
So instead of using "outsourced" labor, they remove jobs by having robots do them.... almost as bad.
http://www.fsckin.com/
I think you meant to say
"The population is always decreasing...in Japan"
I don't think anyone will pay you for that skill.
Does anyone get the feeling that China may be the cause of a new, strange war? Not shooting, but economic, robotic, worker-ethic, or something even stranger?
We already hear complaints that everything is "Made in China" (or Taiwan, but we shall ignore for this discussion). Ok, shoes, T-shirts, etc.,... but now cars?!?
Can China's cheap labor outdo even "Western Civilization's" tech by just throwing enough bodies at it? Toyota is scared that their non-smart bots are non-competitive against China's workforce? What next, Oracle is competing against a billion data enterers? (OK, a bit jokey).\
It just seems that a lot of stuff points back to China as a problem for many countries. [Put on tin foil hat now]
I am just wondering if there will be in the near future (or whatever future in the US's case; and yes I am American) some kind of trade war, social war (China being bad on human rights), maybe terroristic war by who knows who, or just straight out weirdness because China is becoming so powerfull by utilizing a labor method outgrown by pretty much every other world power a long time ago (ie, something akin to slavery- I know this is a powerful and loaded term, and correct, but I could not think of another suitable term that would describe some of the conditions that China lives under.
Sorry for rambling so much.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
My guess would be Japan has one of the strictest immigration laws. How many pockets of Japan are filled with ghettos of 3rd world immigrants? How about the UK? France? US?
I'll be dead.
Come on! Someone had to say that...
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Seastead this.
So the same robot could be the pusher robot and the shover robot at the same time, doubling their protection of us from the terrible secret of space.
I read a few years ago about Japanese car makers investing heavily in robotics, but then didn't hear much more about it. I assumed that with the opening up of markets like China and India research had dwindled due to such low labour costs. This will require jobs to maintain and of course develop the robots. Which really are going to be mechanical arms with some basic AI thrown in.
...I'm waiting for the 'our new robotic overlords' jokes to start flooding in.
Toyota can spend more on design and less on the actuall production of vehicles, which will likely improve safety and performance of the vehicles. I hope over manufacturers follow suit. This should funnel more money into R&D for AI.
Sorry, I just rambled on with thoughts there. hmmm...
why Toyota is building robots in Japan and plans to replicate it elsewhere.
Its a link for non-subscribers(took some digging to find this article but thanks to copernic.)
WSJ.com - As Toyota Closes In on GM, Quality Concerns Also Grow
Another bit: For Canada, though being one of the so called G7, only the Russian built Antonov-124 http://dptscargo.homestead.com/antonov124.html could transport the enormous amounts of aid to the tsunami victims. The Canadians have nothing to rival this giant plane! We Americans are not any better because our even smaller cargo planes are more expensive to operate and require better and longer runways, and cannot self-handle! Airport workers gaped as they had never seen a plane as big with all the independence it has. I was also amazed.
I leased the new Toyota Sienna, and you know what, it's a pleasure to drive not to mention the quiet engine. When I look arround my house, almost everything I use daily is Asian made...from the cell phone to the rice cooker.
As Americans, we must wake up before it's too late.
The non-specialized robot worker will usher new era upon mankind. The think is, in couple of decades we are running out of work for people without college decree. The robots will remove manufacturing jobs and ever expanding self-service industry will cut out jobs from the service sector. This means that societies must adopt to new situation as the current social agreement is based on the assumption that there is jobs for everyone.
It's true that these innovations and changes will create new jobs, but the new jobs are created for the educated people not for the people whose jobs are disappearing.
A world where there are no jobs for everyone isn't necessarily a bad thing, if societies are rearranged so that a decent living is provided for everyone and people start defining themselves not by their profession but by some other attributes.
Sorry, but no it won't. Let me ask you a question: How many robots do you own that do things for you?
My point is that these will be owned by big companies with the capital to buy and develop them. Then they will just rule the world even more. This is something that really scares me. Someday robots will be able to do so much that the big corporations won't need us anymore.
Le français vous intéresse?
Not if it has ambulatory degrees of freedom.
Most manufacturing arms ar stationary devices that move product from an inventory state to a place in a production state. (from a pile of parts onto the object being assembled)
If these "two armed robots" are also able to do more than transition product from point a to point b - but say can pickup and maipulate the assembled object, retreive additional parts from shelving, or reposition themselves so they have access to the assembled object so that they can put on a different part than just one - it will allow them to be "more efficient".
This is due to the fact that they can accomplish the same task in a smaller space with less robots. One armed stationary devices only have a limited window to the line, and can only place (typically) one part - meaning that the line be long and have lots of robots.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you implying that the waves of successive social rearrangement have made things worse for the underclass? The underclass in medieval European societies were essentially owned by the lords. The underclass during the Industrial Revolution were essentially indentured to their employers. The underclass now are still the underclass, but would you argue that their situation is worse than that of the underclass from ages past?
The global economy abstracts the whole capitalist marketplace into two camps: producers and consumers. As long there is some population somewhere that can buy your product (maybe a tiny western European nation with a small, rich population) the rest of the world can go get bent. Crank out your product with robots or slaves or serfs or peasants and make a profit.
You're radically simplifying to the point of distortion. First, producers don't operate solely within a given nation. Second, nations can be both producers and consumers in the same market.
Internal markets are where it's at in the rapidly developing economies that used to be beholden to the industrial leaders. Take a look at the computer technology and automotive markets in China. Not only are foreign companies entering China, home-grown companies are serving the increasing demands of the Chinese themselves. Would they have been able to build up internal demand without the wealth generated by exports?
Rampant capitalism is known as the black market and it doesn't work very well in the long run. The global economy isn't far from rampant capitalism, but it will work to some extent right up until the point where everybody's job has been replaced by a robot. Then nobody will be able to afford a new television, and the system will be in trouble.
Black markets are present in all economies, but large black markets are the product of restrictive state controls on commerce. People want something that the state doesn't want them to have, so people steal from the state and sell the goods on the black market. The rest of your statement comparing capitalism as a whole to the black market is strange, given that the freer the market, the less likely it is to have a black market.
A little international labor law and careful import/export management would be help, but one thing is for certain - this is not the path to utopia where "societies are rearranged so that a decent living is provided for everyone". This is the path to peasantry, serfdom, servitude, and slavery through debt. This is the road to a life where a communist revolution starts to sound like a good idea.
You mentioned the terms peasant, serf, and Comrade interchangeably in the first paragraph, but now you're saying that a Communist revolution sounds like a good idea. Given the historical failures of Communism (including the liquidation of, rather than marginalization of undesirables), it doesn't sound like such a great idea to me.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Building anthropomorphic robots for an assembly line is (in this engineers opinion) inefficient. The tool should be matched to do the job specifically at had. Hell, Toyota was one of the companies that started the buzz in Lean Manufacturing.
I work with robots. Robots are my friends. You, sir, are no robot. Wait, I mean you, sir, are not thinking of the right robot.
"Uh... yeah, Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?" --Pinky