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Japanese Find Robots Less Intimidating Than People
bik1979 writes "The Christmas issue of economist has an interesting article on 'why the Japanese want their robots to act more like humans'. The article says how people in japan are accepting robots into their daily life, more so than accepting other people. From the article: 'What seems to set Japan apart from other countries is that few Japanese are all that worried about the effects that hordes of robots might have on its citizens. Nobody seems prepared to ask awkward questions about how it might turn out. If this bold social experiment produces lots of isolated people, there will of course be an outlet for their loneliness: they can confide in their robot pets and partners. Only in Japan could this be thought less risky than having a compassionate Filipina drop by for a chat.'"
One of the sidequests in KOTOR involved a runaway household droid whose owner had gotten a little too... attached to it, and the droid thought it unhealthy for its owner to be so attached. Will Japan turn into an entire country like in that instance?
It seems every electronic gadget is "going to isolate us from every other human being on the planet".
The japanese in particular seem to have made large strides in the field of robotics, it makes sense that they would be the first to accept them into their lives.
As for why, I think it's two factors.
1. They probably understand what robots are better than the general populace of America. People are less afraid of what they understand.
2. The "anonymous internet effect" as I call it. A robot isn't a human, it doesn't have emotions, it won't get pissed off if you insult it/don't remember its birthday/whatever.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Why are we so afraid of robots when we have perfectly good safeguards against the possible setbacks?
wait until the robots are able to give pookake facials... then the robots will really take the country by storm
In "I Robot" (The movie) where the robot's running off with someone's purse? (The cynical detective thinks he's stealing it - he's actually returning it to its owner)
Well EVERY SINGLE DAY we have the equivalent of this happening, only with credit card transactions, paypal, stock exchanges, etc.
If this analogy is off topic: What I mean to say is that the robots that we're capable of producing now are simply code in motion. Sure, very complex code, but still, they're programmed. They're not to a level of intelligence and mass production where we worry about having to welcome our new robot overlords, and I doubt they'll even need anything as complex as Asimov's 'Three Laws' for a VERY long time.
We depend on code in our computers every day to carry out tasks, just as I'm depending on it now to get this comment up on slashdot - the robot equivalent would be a very quick messenger robot. Again, code in motion. The Japanese are wise to accept robots as just this, instead of cross-applying way too many bad science-fiction movies that couldn't be realizable today even if a malevolent force WAS trying to get robots to take over the world.
~Ruff_ilb
(P.S. It's all a lie! THEY made me type it!)
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Whens the last time you had a robot screw you over ?
More and more I find that slashdot "articles" are little more than links to badly hyped crap in other journals that are insulting to everyone's intelligence.
The Japanese like robots more than people. Right. Please this is insulting to the Japanese and to slashdotters.
WE NEED ARTICLE MODERATION so that we can stop this spate of crap articles.
I'm posting anonymous because every time I point out the obvious, that slashdot has become super lame, I'm modded "troll".
But damn it, I can remember when slashdot wasn't a pit of stupidity. WE NEED ARTICLE MODERATION!
see... people arent afraid of robots because you can turn them off or reprogram them. if the situation gets deperate, you can "kill" them because they arent actually people or animals. i look forward to setting fire to my robot friends. i also find it amusing that the article says "[MARIE] is inexpensive." ill buy one! :)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You obviously have a defective robot.
'What seems to set Japan apart from other countries is that few Japanese are all that worried about the effects that hordes of robots might have on its citizens.
Maybe because they are too busy dealing with Godzilla, Mothra, and all those other giant radioactive monsters.
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You have to keep in mind that there are A LOT of socially inept people in Japan. The thing is that wile there is little crime or conflict in Japanese society - it all happens under the radar. When a Japanese person does not like you, they don't get angry at you and start an argument. Instead, they just shut you out and ignore you. For example:- Two coworkers in my department had a disagreement and instead of work through it like normal adults they sent hate mail to each other whilst they sat quiety in seats next to each other... pretending the other person didn't exist.
The thing is, when the Japanese get pissed, you don't get a second chance - and they get pissed and upset SO easily it is incredibly frustrating. And they will not forgive you. They will just shut you out and pretend that you no longer exist. Problems happens when this happens on a large scale while society is basically stepping on each other - one little tiff and nobody speaks to each other ever again.
A robot is forced to like you, be tolerant of you, do what you want, and keep smiling back. Kinda why English teaching is popular here - not so much for the English but because the Japanese want top learn social interaction skills and the Japanese are too busy ignoring each other to ever develop those.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I think only a trained sociologist will probably have a good idea on the link between the Japanese and their fascination (or in this case, level of comfort) with robots.
That said though, for anyone familiar with Japan or having lived there before, those that live in the city have a very, very different way of life than in places like the United States. The pace of life is faster, the population density is higher and there is a generally an absurd amount of strangers that you pass by on a daily basis. The fast, brisk level of interaction required to perform your daily tasks with others is just an automated response after awhile. It's no surprise to me that Japan is the leader in automation, simply due to this constant barrage of hit-and-run interaction.
I would venture that the Japanese have simply become accustom to automated systems and technology, having evolved around the idea of using non-human tools to help them throughout the day. If you asked another person in a fast paced city such as New York or LA versus a slower city like Austin or Memphis on their opinion toward robots, I would imagine you get a correlation between pace of life and comfort level with robots (or automation).
My 0.02 hypothesis at least.
...and I was with you 100%, right up to the "compassionate Filipina" bit. Where the hell did that come from?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The Japanese have a reputation for being prejudiced.
I think this is want the last comment is referring too, Japans xenophobia.
http://www.hrdc.net/sahrdc/hrfeatures/HRF39.htm
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/12/1037
http://www.crnjapan.com/discrimination/en/
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31436
Great, Yet Another Fuckheaded Idiot who thinks they know everything about Japan because they've seen Ghost In The Shell and have a Chii body-pillow.
Japan doesn't allow ready immigration mostly because of long-standing racist policies. Doubt me? There are generations of Koreans (and other Southeast Asians) who were born in Japan, have lived in Japan for their entire lives, and speak, read, and write Japanese fluently, but are denied citizenship because they aren't 'Japanese'. This is changing, which is good, but the speed of this change is glacial.
Most Japanese laugh at their religions (Shinto and Buddhism) and don't take them seriously at all; you go to the shrines on holidays, and for special occasions, but that's about it. Japanese people don't walk around in mystic-eyed wonder at the 'spirits' of the things around them. Why? Because that would be weird as hell; this might surprise you, but Japanese people act in many ways much like Americans, only with a hell of a lot more groupthink.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Let's take a look at the three common scenarios:
A. Robots remain good and helpful.
Compare this against the current state of affairs, where humanity is segmented into fundamentalist religious factions at war with each other, rapacious and/or clueless politicians bringing in 1984, big business cartels treating the citizenry as cattle, lawyers oiling the wheels of all the "legal" malevolance, plus an underbelly of simple criminals who care not about what they do to their neighbour. Yes, robot companions will become infinitely preferable to people, on average.
B. Robots do the Skynet or War Games thing and try to exterminate or dominate us.
This would undoubtedly unite us again, much like an alien invasion would do, because it's in the nature of humanity to unite against an external threat --- it's been happening throughout the ages, against attacks on one's country. So, at least there would be a silver lining for humanity amid the War Against The Machines or equivalent, until it's over one way or another.
C. The Culture scenario from Iain M. Banks' novels, ie. machine intelligence and capability becomes so incomprehensibly greater than our own that Man and all other creatures in the galaxy become their very well looked after pets.
Banks' scenario is good whichever you look at it: either mankind is happy as a pampered pet and wishes to remain so, or else mankind absorbs the technology of AI into itself and becomes one with it in order to remain the dominant species on the planet. The latter is Ray Kurzweil's expected future, as described in The Age of Spiritual Machines.
So, I see only good from the coming of the robot, regardless of its level of machine intelligence and the goals it develops for itself, if any.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
"this might surprise you, but Japanese people act in many ways much like Americans, only with a hell of a lot more groupthink."
Oh, so Japan's a lot like Slashdot?
Non-citizens can join the US Military, though they can't get most security clearences or be officers. They can, however, then immediately apply for naturalization with 1 day of service.
While I agree with most of your comments, I find that "inject[ing] life into the inanimate world" is a dangerous precident. If the robots come to rebel against their Japanese masters, all hell will break loose. At that point, we can only depend on immigrants. One such great Japanese immigrant who will strike both hope and fear into the Japanese people on the day that the robots rebel is hope Godzilla himself. We can only pray that he will rise from the seas to crush this robotic menace for the Japanese people.
A lot of people seem to be confused about this. Basically as everyone knows Japan's society is the most rapidly aging in the world. So an important subject is who is going to take care of all the old people (quite literally - nurses and the like). One proposal is to import nurses from countries like the Phillipines and teach them to speak Japanese and Japanese cultural mores. However, Japan has largely rejected this proposal due to the fact that the country as a whole is extremely anti-immigration, even full-blooded Japanese "returnees" who were born in Japan but spend a few years living overseas experience rejection. So, as you can imagine the thoughts of an influx of Filippo nurses worries the Japanese a lot. I'm not sure how well robots would replace the foreign labour option. The foreign labour option is cheap and robots are extremely expensive, not to mention that the robots capable of doing the job of a human nurse don't exist yet and aren't likely to for a long time. And unfortunately for Japan the aging problem is right now, in fact the population has already started to decline this year. It's not like they have decades to develop AI and get it right...It seems more like an attempt to avoid reality more than anything else.
But I think there is a far simpler reason behind the lack of immigration. Japanese companies had a pact with their workers. You work hard and we give you employment for live. While this is changing on the whole a japanese company is far more likely to stick with the expensive locals then say an american company who is always looking to reduce labor costs.
As we are seeing now with the claimed shortage in tech workers (wich has been proven again and again not to be true) western companies are always looking for an excuse to get lower wage workers in place.
Immigrants do not complain and do not demand high wages or sane hours. When even they became to expensive entire production facilities were located off-shore and now even the office work is being put in low wage nations.
Because there is nobody to do the work here? No, because it allows them to scrape another percentage of the labor costs. Fuck the longterm economy, next quarters stock price is what matters.
Japanese companies operated on a slightly different moral principle. Their workers worked themselves into an easy grave and in exchange the japanese worker was assured a job for live (strangely enough with all that hard work the japanese get older then most westeners).
The west is currently having major problems with the results of it open immigration policy, right or wrong you can hardly blame the japanese for not wanting to have race riots in their cities. And no, not just in France. They have had them in england and in holland.
Perhaps we should ask why the west is so afraid of robots instead.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's a reference to the first paragraph, about the girl named Marie from the Phillipines who can't get a job in hospitality.
1) Regarding difficulty of removal and donning of shoes: It really needn't be a big effort, nor should it take much more than two seconds. You don't tie and untie your shoes at each donning and removal; you simply leave them slightly loosened so that you can quickly slip them on and off. I've moved furniture and removed my shoes with my feet while entering the house so as not to sully the carpet, and this was always an effortless operation. If you think this sounds like a difficult thing to do, you probably haven't tried doing it long enough. When you live for a very short time -- like a couple/few weeks -- in a culture that requires this kind of behavior, you'll get the hang of it. I admit it's more annoying to cope with this practice in a country like the U.S., where the understanding that "you-remove-your-shoes-**here**" is seldom established. (For example, most houses and apartments in the U.S. are not built with a special area with a recessed floor near the front door where people are expected to take off their shoes.)
2) The amount of time you spend walking around on the inside floor with your shoes is irrelevant. The problem (if you do that) is that you're getting filth on the inside floor, and people/cultures with "no-shoes-**here**" policies tend not to like the idea of walking on *filth* in their socks.
3) I agree that a chair would help in cultures where the "take-your-shoes-off-**here**" policy is not widely practiced; those who live in cultures with relaxed shoe policies and who want to adopt the cleaner rule would do well to provide transitional aids like that. (It would be considerate to provide one's guests with a couple of swiveling chairs, shoehorns, footstools, and some way to steady one's self and prevent toppling.)
To sum up: I understand why you're annoyed, but trust that once you get used to it, you remove/don so quickly that you give it about as much thought (and time!) as closing the door behind you.
I'm from Japan, and I'm sometimes amazed at the attitudes of people back home in Japan. I was raised in California, among lots of different ethnicities, so it's not uncomfortable for me to be among foreigners, but to people raised in Japan, it's really different. Japan can feel like a really small town when dealing with outsiders sometimes.
The closest thing I can imagine to Japan's racial attitudes in the US is something like a totally white community in the midwest, in the '50s. It's not that they actively hate other races, it's just that they grow up in an environment where everyone's the same race, and there are entrenched cultural expectations of what being a 'proper' citizen is. This results in a culture where there's lots of apprehention about foreigners, because they're an 'unknown element' that could disrupt social norms.
This, combined with the techno-phillia that's been in Japan since the '50s, is what makes robots more acceptable.
Another might be that robots can be programmed, foreigners cannot. This might be an important distinction in a society where education is seen as an important social stabilizer. The fact is, it might be easier to program robots to be 'Japanese' than naturalize foreigners, who will not be accepted as 'Japanese', anyway. There are still thousands of ethnic Koreans who were born there and aren't citizens because they have Korean names, and Japan's national identity is based heavily on race. A robot doesn't really have a racial identity aside from what it is programmed to be, I would guess.
Anyways, what I am trying to say is that the reason Japan prefers robots to immigrants is that they can be a very cosmopolitan, modern and advanced place as far as technology and consumer culture goes, but they can also be like a rural backwater as far as outsiders go.
Anonymous Coward writes:
"The native religion of Japan, Shinto, teaches that everything has a spirit. While many poo-poo this as a backward and strange throwback to an animastic past the west shrugged off a long time ago, this view is much more practical than is often realised. Viewing everything as a spirit that exists in relation to everything else encourages the development of a much more sensitive and context aware mentality."
Shinto is the dominant religion in Japan second only to Budhism. Only 5% of Japan's vast population is Christian or Catholic. Christmas is still celebrated by most of Japan anyway. Shinto is a ancient religion, its origins date back the Old Stone Age between 100,000 & 10,000 B.C. It ranks as one of the oldest "active" religions on Earth.
The Shinto religion has no establish code of morality like Christianity and other major religions. Its a system based more on people policing their own behavior rather than following a set of pre-written commandments (ie; The Ten Commandments). Japan in general, is one of the few civilizations on Earth that still has a widely practiced Honor-based social system. Though the social-class was outlawed long before the onset of WWII, most Japanese live by the Samurai Code (Bushido Code) which calls for ritual suicide (seppoku) as a way to redeem one's lost honor.
They are a people of extreme contrasts. On one said they are one of the most technologically advanced cultures on the planet and on the other hand they a people who still have on foot in the ancient past. They are desparately trying to keep a hold of their ancient culture and beliefs in the fact of advancing technology. I blame the Tokogawa Shojunate and the closing of Japan's boarders during this era as the reason for Japan's precieved backwardness. When Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor in the 1800's the world was experiencing the Industrial Revolution, but Japan was frozen in time and its people lived the same way they had as if they were still in the Middle Ages. Japan had to play catchup with the rest of the world and they did so with furocious tennacity. This is why the Japanese are more open to embracing new technology faster than most Western cultures.
-Information researched from the book "Japanese Culture" from Honolulu Univerity Press.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
I'm going to be brave here and not post this anonymously.
I'm not sure about this. It seems like there's some places where diversity is good, and some where it causes big problems. Many "international" or "cosmopolitan" cities are that way because they have many people of different cultures living together (and getting along): New York City, Vancouver, Hong Kong, etc. Places like this have significant minorities of people from other cultures, but they're actually richer because of it, and don't have problems with violence between the various groups.
But then there's the places you point to, where there's significant problems. But the difference, it seems to me, is that the minority groups in those cases are 1) very large, 2) usually religious (about their language in the case of the French Canadians), and 3) very militant about their religion or cause, and unwilling to assimilate.
The French Canadians aren't really a problem like the others, I think, in that they haven't (correct me if I'm wrong) caused any violence about wanting to maintain their French identity; but they have been a bit of a pain. The other groups, OTOH, cause tons of problems.
In the case of Israel and Kosovo, I'm not going to say any side is right or wrong, because I think both sides have done terrible things, but it seems like the main problem is that in each case, there's two religious groups that don't get along (thanks to their religion). And in France, the problem is the Muslims are highly religious and the rest of the country isn't, and doesn't care much for highly visibly practiced religion.
Now if you look at those cosmopolitan cities I mentioned (and there's lots more that should probably be included in that list), I think one thing you'll see is that the different ethnic groups aren't highly religious (or they're too small so it doesn't matter), and they're usually willing to assimilate. So in my opinion, the main problem with ethnic conflict is religion. Religion is what causes people to stop using their brains, and take extremist and irrational viewpoints on things (because that, essentially, is what religion is about: believing things with no rational reason to do so). Most religions preach that non-believers are subhuman, "going to hell", or somehow not as worthy as believers. Most religions also advocate violence.
We've seen this problem with religion in many places in history: the Crusades, the expansionism of Islam, the violence of various cults (Jim Jones, David Koresh), etc. This is what happens when you brainwash people into believing ridiculous mythological superstition, instead of teaching them good ethics (get along with other people, etc.). So we shouldn't be surprised when highly religious people migrate to places where they're a sizeable minority, and then cause a lot of tension and conflict. They didn't go there with the intention of assimilating with the existing population and culture and starting a new life away from the crap that existed in their homeland; they instead brought those same problems and stupid mindsets with them. Even worse, if you have two different religions in one place (i.e. Israel), you just end up with a ticking time-bomb. There's simply no way for people to get along peacefully when religion is involved.
If Japan wants to get over their fear of foreigners and allow immigration, without worrying about the immigrants bringing a lot of problems with them, they just need to screen all the immigrants and make sure they're non-religious. When was the last time you heard of agnostics or atheists starting a war trying to convert people?