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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.
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.
"...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.
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.
I think you meant to say
"The population is always decreasing...in Japan"
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...
For a Japanese manufacturer, outsourcing to Detroit probably doesn't represent a cost savings or an efficiency boost.
You don't have to pay benefits to a robot, and they work longer shifts.
North American workers simply aren't willing to view themselves as cheap labour to pick up the slack from more expensive places to do manufacturing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think that ``looming labor shortage'' refers to their looming demographic crisis.
Japan's population is aging fast. They're getting older at the rate of one year per year, of course, but they aren't breeding fast enough to replace themselves. That's going to have lots of effects on Japan, most of them bad. One of those bad effects will be a labor shortage. You see, the number of people who are both willing and physically able to work is going to fall off as the current generation of workers gets too old to work.
Europe is facing the same problem, and they're dealing with it via gastarbeiters. Apparently, Japan is going to deal with it using robots.
See what I've been reading.
Get off it. It's been done before. The people were called peasants or serfs or comrades. When the people are unable to contribute to the GDP, then society has no need for the people and they are marginalized.
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.
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.
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.