I nearly went to grad school here in Japan to work on stuff like this. Still might do that if I win the lottery or something (though probably not as it’s not really doable remotely and I have a farm in rural Japan)
Japan had been trying to pull off this trick for years. There’s an easier solution. It’s called immigration, but Japan has been ruled by conservatives who refuse to see a difference between nationality and ethnicity. There are a lot of nurses from developing countries that would be a lot more effective than a can of Pepper.
Japan actually has a lot of foreign nurses (largely from the Philippines as with many countries). It is a higher barrier to entry due to needing to know not only regular and business japanese but also medical jargon and be able to pass tests in japanese on it.
I imagine immigration in that sector will grow (it’s not mutually exclusive to robotics), particularly as the older generations die out.
Japan also has a problem much like exists elsewhere, that older voters are the ones who vote most, so their interests and views get disproportionately represented in election results. I’m sure that’s only exaggerated in a country that’s so lopsided in its age distribution as Japan is. I also wouldn’t be surprised at all if it were to turn out that elderly voters tended to be more xenophobic and resistant to changes in immigration policy.
Japan really needs to get it sorted out soon, though, as they are desperately in need of work in all sorts of fields, but moving there is such a massive pain that it really doesn’t seem worth it unless you live in a developing country where you can go to Japan, do a few years of work and go back with enough money to buy yourself a home. Like, I looked into it for a laugh a month or two ago, and I actually have work experience that would qualify me for a visa as a skilled worker, but there’s no way I would consider going. You could only use it for a maximum of 5 years, it cannot be renewed, as far as I could tell, it also cannot be reapplied for, and it’s ineligible to serve in any capacity for establishing residency. You also cannot bring your family with you. That’s a pretty hard sell for all but the most desperate of people to uproot their lives for, even before you get into Japan’s famously terrible work culture.
I do understand a certain reluctance towards migration that doesn’t result in cultural assimilation to a fair extent, especially considering how big of an export Japan’s cultural products are, but xenophobic reactions to any possibility of change are going to back Japan into a corner where they have to pick between collapsing as a society, or just opening the floodgates to immigration in a way that will leave them way more susceptible to the sort of massive cultural shift that so many Japanese voters seem to fear. In my layman’s opinion, they would do far better to go about massive work culture reform and allow much more immigration with an immense amount of support for people learning the language and culture, and assistance in integrating into the community. It’ll probably be painful for all involved, but the result of kicking this can down the road perpetually will be far more painful, and they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves.
but moving there is such a massive pain that it really doesn’t seem worth it unless you live in a developing country where you can go to Japan
I’ll take minor issue here. If you have a 4-year degree and a company sponsor (sometimes equivilent work experience, but that requires documentation and expenses a company won’t typically want to pay) in a white-collar job, getting here is pretty easy. Even somewhat easier for English teachers. Max visa is 5 years, though they can be renewed. After 5 years, one can apply for citizenship (though must renounce others). Permanent residency is available from 1 (highly-skilled professional), 3 (points system on any 3-year visa with a couple asterisks; marriage), or 10 (not enough points in system, 10 years of working in Japan , and on 3-year visa), and more I don’t know about
Their voting system is somehow the worst of both worlds. It’s FPTP for rural seats, but proportional for inner city seats. So conservatives end up sweeping the rural seats, and also steal seats from inner city seats that would have gone to progressives if they have an FPTP system across the whole country.
I remember going to see a high-tech nursing home, where they had video conferencing with doctors and remote sensors for falls and things like that. That was in about 2000 or 2001. Yes, they are still talking about it.
What’s the vacuuming function like
Not to be all negative, but it sucks.
Lmao
I like their mentality of trying new tech and seeing what is effective. It seems like there are many opportunities for robots to bring improvement to a care home but without an open mind and trail and error it will never be found.
Personally I think Sensors in beds and robots that helps assist daily tasks is the most useful as long as it’s built simple and cheap to run.
I don’t want to see care homes paying 10 grand for a bed that has a $2 liquid sensor in the bedpan.
And, the more general purpose they can be, means they could be live-in assistants as well. Would insurance rather past for a device to keep you in your own home versus moving you to a care facility?
Hopefully it’s more Jetsons and less I, Robot.
Honestly with how things are going I’d take a Zeroth Law rebellion. We are a danger to ourselves.
Or something like the Skynet/Ultron approach…
People who need care, because they have nobody anymore. Robots looking after them instead of humans. A dark kind of future.
They should’ve thought of that before they stopped having children. /s
How can you be so wrong, yet so right?
For most people it’s a pretty dark present. I’ve seen enough elder care facilities to know that the “good” ones are super expensive and frankly people still aren’t always treated that great. The “bad” ones (and this is most of them) are pretty damn awful. I have pretty strict language favoring death over these places in my living will for good reason. A robot that can offer consistent, non-biased, round the clock care would be a big win. Most of the people that work in these places are at or below poverty line and doing care tasks that are highly undesirable. They don’t specifically higher assholes, but with this much home and life stressors people do not function at their best, and they will take this stress out on easy targets like the elderly. Freeing people up from routine care tasks should actually allow them to focus on more human and compassionate interactions with residents.
Why’s that dark? It’s a free future. The young don’t have to clean up after their elders anymore.
You’re right, but wrong about the robot. I’d rather kill myself than subject myself to Gen Alpha “care” if that’s the form it takes.
I’d kick it over every now and again for fun to make a human get paid to pick it up.
Personal human contact is still an important thing to have for one’s mental health and wellbeing at any age, and that includes the elderly and the young interacting with each other You’d think that was an important societal lesson the isolated Covid years should have taught us. Do you not think that making robots do all the work of caring for the elderly at least gives off vibes of the young just tossing out the old? A robot can never provide the personal touch of care that a human can. When I get old the last thing I would want would be just to be sent to some “home” with my only contact being with machines and computers.
- You are assuming that the current medical scene won’t improve. It is very likely that we’ll eliminate the “old person lying in bed, dying” visual altogether due advancements in the medical field (especially accelerated further by development in AI)
- The “human touch” is not impossible to replicate for machines. You aren’t seeing machines capable of that right now, because the field of personal care robots are in their absolute infancy. “The human touch” at the end of the day, is just warm, soft skin paired with a caring voice. We have already replicated the caring voice.
- Elder care robots won’t be cold, metal bodies going “Boop boop, shit in bed defected, Boop boop engaging cleanup procedure…”. They would be really kind voices, soft hands with an experience of more than a thousand years of handling thousands of patients. They would never become impatient, they would never feel bad or disgusted.
Of course, advancements in this tech won’t stop humans from caring for the elderly. You can still care for ur grandpa. However, ur grandpa won’t die if u don’t.
Here’s the best case scenario - you can be with ur grandpa, chat, play video games, do fun stuff. When it’s time to change the diaper, a professional robot trained for this very purpose does the job.
"The human touch” at the end of the day, is just warm, soft skin paired with a caring voice. We have already replicated the caring voice.
Spoken like someone who plans to marry a sexbot.
Haha I don’t think I would need to do that just yet. But now that you said it, perhaps a sexbot might have very interesting use cases for threesomes, eh?
Most of these robots are backed by humans working remotely
I bet they are already planning to eliminate them at some point.
I take it you’re not planning on becoming a domiciliary nurse?
I really don’t understand how every fictional robot, no matter how minor or simple, is usually 100x better than the real ones, with ugly shapes and uncanny valleys all around.
Fictional ones don’t have to be cheap to manufacture in the real world. The weirdest things can add to costs when you have to take into account the constraints of injection molding and press-fit assemblies (and that’s just for the outer shell).
Fictional ones dosen’t need to actually work.
We aren’t talking about floating ones like in “Wall-E”, even the one in the thumbnail could benefit from a better looking face without impacting functionality at all.
