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Japan Trials Driverless Cars In Bid To Keep Rural Elderly On the Move (reuters.com)
According to Reuters, Japan is starting to experiment with self-driving buses in rural communities such as Nishikata, 71 miles (115 km) north of the capital, Tokyo, where elderly residents struggle with fewer bus and taxi services as the population ages and shrinks. From the report: The swift advance of autonomous driving technology is prompting cities such as Paris and Singapore to experiment with such services, which could prove crucial in Japan, where populations are not only greying, but declining, in rural areas.Japan could launch self-driving services for remote communities by 2020, if the trials begun this month prove successful. The government plans to turn highway rest stops into hubs from which to ferry the elderly to medical, retail and banking services. In the initial trials of the firm's driverless six-seater Robot Shuttle, elderly residents of Nishikata, in Japan's Tochigi prefecture, were transferred between a service area and a municipal complex delivering healthcare services. The test also checked the vehicle's operational safety in road conditions ranging from puddles to fallen debris, and if those crossing its path would react to the warning it emits.
How about developing robots to care for the elderly so we don't have to send them to cruel nursing homes that kill them?
How about developing mecha for the elderly that allow them to walk to the shops and, if necessary, tear the roof off in order to find that brand of potato bun they like so much?
Most of those fucking places are inhumane, where the elderly get hidden away to die, in a corner, out of sight. Fuck those places. How about developing robots to care for the elderly so we don't have to send them to cruel nursing homes that kill them? Driverless cars are fine, but let's do more.
Yeah, I'm pissed. My grandmother died in a fucking nursing home a few days ago, most likely due to them being incredibly negligent. Develop robots and put those homes out of business.
I cook in a nursing home. I can tell you that most of people who work there care deeply about the well being of the people they serve. I know I do. It is very sad indeed that there are care facility companies that take advantage of the elderly. But the same goes for the US prison system.
What I can tell you is that some good non profit care facilities that make it easy for the relatives to help in the care process have much better levels of care than the ones that charge more and essentially are just there to make money for the share holders. Then there are ones that are just plain bad and need to be reorganized or put out of business like the one that just killed seniors from heat stroke in Florida by not providing adequate emergency power and staffing to keep the residents hydrated and safe! With a working hospital right next door for Gods sake!
The problems with caring for seniors is a complex and difficult situation and the more the profit motive dictates care models the more shoddy the care will become. Same as the irresponsible patent drug companies that fleece the health care system for all they can grab. I am deeply sorry that your grandmother died in a care facility and the passing was not a good death, I have seen this and had a father who died miserably while under care. But this does not mean that there are not good people working to make a difference.
Japan has much greater respect for the elderly than we do and we can learn a great deal from what they do as the average age of the population increases. Robots and robotic mobility is one possible adjunct to future care but without help from relatives, responsible institutions (in the best sense of the word) and professional care givers who truly care all the devices in the world will not make a difference.
This is really about urbanization, not population changes, and it's not limited to Japan.
The issue is that young people leave rural areas - for school, higher education, jobs - and don't return. Cities grow while rural areas shrink, and eventually the population becomes too small and too sparse to support a good range of public services. Similar things are happening in Europe and in north America as well.
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I don't think it's that easy. There are going to be edge cases that happen during that 90% of the time that are also unsafe. A child or pet that didn't quite appear in a sensor, a sudden storm. What are you going to do if those occur, park by the side of the road and force a walk home?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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I agree low birthrates is a problem (although the reasons are principally economical rather than social). I live in Japan and see this first hand.
Low birth rates is not the cause of the rural depopulation, though. That has been an ongoing trend since long before the population stopped growing; and it's a trend in countries whose populations are stable or still growing at present.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Where does the dividing line come?
Here in the US most of our roadways were designed around cars. Even in older cities, the pre-automobile streets tend to be wider than their counterparts in older, say European cities. That's what drives our mania for large cars that simply would be impractical in many countries.
Japan has a lot of ancient roadways that are extremely narrow and sometimes windy. This has prompted the evolution of motor vehicles that seem amusingly tiny to American eyes, but are in fact the only practical solution in many cases for getting a motorized vehicle where it has to go.
If you want a bus that will reach rural elderly people on the other side of a bridge that was built just wide enough to accomodate a tractor, it's got to be a very small bus -- more the size that Americans would consider normal for a car, and not maybe not even a large car at that. But it is a bus in that it plays the role of a bus.
Japanese engineers seem to be more willing to think outside the box when it comes to system concepts; or perhaps Japanese consumers are more open-minded than American consumers. It's not just that they're good at miniaturization; they're also good at making ridiculously large things. Size is something that culturally speaking they're more at home playing with.
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Human drivers don't handle edge cases either as evidenced by the over 5,000 pedestrians are killed by human drivers every year and 130,000 being treated for non-fatal injuries.