Japan may pick robots over immigrants

Anyone else notice how the BBC volume thing goes up to 11

I know that they are putting large amounts of money into farm robots so that older and fewer farmers can do more work

Japan is pretty clearly Xenophobic (and in some cases pretty damn racist), and it will be interesting to see, if they can create robots to replace Human workers, that actually do the job as well.

Now, if the Robot thing doesn't work out, there in for a heap of trouble.

Go robots!

I saw this documentary once, Terminator 2 I believe it was called. This may not end well.

I wonder if this is a way of getting rid of all of those silver-painted robotic twats who turn up at festivals?

Rowley Birkin QC wrote: »

01110111 01100101 00100000 01110100 01110101 01101011 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101010 01100101 01110010 01100010 01100010 01110011 01110011 01110011 00100001 00100001

Binary solo!

Er, I mean : 010000100110100101101110011000010111001001111001001000000111001101101111011011000110111100100001

biko wrote: »

There's a good blog here about being a black American in Japan in case anyone is interested.

Anyway, if someone can make this whole robots thing actually work it's the Japanese. They're very far along when it comes to technology. Japan leads the world in building robots, and the bots show remarkable skill. Honda’s famous android, Asimo, has served tea, conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and freaked-out James May of the BBC program Top Gear. Toyota’s robots have even played the violin and the trumpet.

And he's great at falling down stairs too.


Anyway, in my experience Japan is a fairly xenophobic - even racist - country. It's an attitude that exists at all levels of society, though it's obviously stronger in the older, more rural Japanese person.

It's not malicious or hateful though, it's mostly born out of ignorance. Japan was sealed off from the world for a long time, and opened itself up less than 200 years ago. The only contact they had with Western civilisation was trading on a couple of islands with Dutch merchants, until the yanks showed up with gunboats in Tokyo Bay in the mid 1800s. And even since then, its location and culture has resulted in very few Westerners settling there.

On top of that, the culture clash is so huge that it's quite understandable that the Japanese are wary of Westerners. There's a huge importance placed on respect, decorum and formality in Japan, so when a load of oi-oi-brits-abroad rock up in Tokyo to go on the tear, it creates a poor image of foreigners in Japan. Obviously not all foreigners are like that - but the few that are stand out a mile from normal Japanese society, where loutish behaviour, petty crime and so on is very rare.

It's changing though, and changing quickly. In many ways, it's no different to Ireland a few decades ago. Black and Asian communities were non-existent and met with ignorance when they did arrive, but we quickly adapted and now we don't bat an eyelid.