Japanese And American Robots

03/16/2006

Steve Sailer did a piece two years ago called Japanese Substitute Inventiveness for Immigration; NYT Shocked in which he talked about the robots that Japan was developing to help care for the elderly. Here’s a progress report in the news, forwarded by a loyal reader:

TOKYO (AFP) — A Japanese-led research team said it had made a seeing, hearing and smelling robot that can carry human beings and is aimed at helping care for the country’s growing number of elderly.

Government-backed research institute Riken said the 158-centimeter (five-foot) RI-MAN humanoid can already carry a doll weighing 12 kilograms (26 pounds) and could be capable of bearing 70 kilograms within five years.
Aging Japan builds robot to look after elderly — Yahoo! News

When I saw this fellow here on the left, I was reminded of some famous science fiction robots, including the famous Frank Kelly Freas sad robot, fromAstounding Science Fiction, in 1953, which was used as an album cover by Queen. This robot appears to be saying "Oops" because the man he’s picked up has proved excessively fragile.

This is not an encouraging thought, if robots are going to take care of me in my old age. Then there was Joe, Henry Kuttner’s "Proud Robot." (Click to see Joe admiring himself in the mirror. ) Joe was designed by an inventor who liked to drink, which means that he woke up one morning and found a robot that he couldn’t remember building, and that he didn’t know what it was supposed to do.

But we have a lot of articles on Vdare.com for mechanical solutions to problems that are being solved today with cheap labor, here’s a laundry list (laundry, there’s another thing that used to require immigrant labor, but is now a machine in your basement):

Technology and organization are substitutes for labor. That’s why, here in the foothills of the Berkshires, we've just been plowed out of a New England snowstorm by one sixtyish man with a pickup truck, rather than dug out by fifty Mexicans with shovels.[Peter Brimelow]
Mowing Alone? Technology Works on Grass as Well as Snow, by yours truly. Here’s the latest on the Robot Lawnmower.
Now, a combine rolls into a field. In a matter of hours, one or two workers harvest and store the grain. Labor is reduced at least tenfold.
Give us this day, by Harold Brewer
In 1979, President Carter’s Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland ended government financing of research into farming technology because he didn’t want to replace "an adequate and willing work force with machines." That was just about the time we started hearing about how Americans wouldn’t take those jobs anyway. The"adequate and willing work force" Mr. Bergland was talking about was made up of immigrants. [Sam Francis, in an article featuring the mechaniezed canopy shakers which may replace immigrant workers in Florida. They're big, scary machines. But the workers are kind of scary, too.]
myRobot — Our Easter Bunny [Steve Sailer on the Roomba.]

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