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Here's why Japan is obsessed with robots

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Here's why Japan is obsessed with robots

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Rarely a week passes without a headline about a new type of robot coming out of Japan.

Whether they're making an evening cocktail, performing at a restaurant or combining cellphone communication with personal companionship - the hype is real in Japan.

CNBC headed to Tokyo to get to know some of these technological advancements promising to reshape the way we live.

What about the threat of automation taking away jobs?

In Japan automation is less of a threat to jobs and more about economic survival. In 2014, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unveiled reforms with hopes that the robot market would reach $21 billion by 2020.

As the nation suffers from a chronic labor shortage, it is striving to be the largest robotics-support society in the world.

Meanwhile, Japan's service sector accounts for about 70 percent of its economic output, yet labor productivity is 40 percent less than in the U.S., according to Japanese government estimates. The contrast puts a strain on the industry sector and now companies like McDonald's are cutting back on the number of 24-hour outlets.

Robots are seen as a 'must-have'

Economists argue that Japan either needs to accept more immigrants or put robots to work.

Japan's overall population is now declining at the fastest rate globally. The country sells more adult diapers than baby diapers and fewer workers to support an aging population likely leads to poor economic growth.

You're fired

If you think robots are poised to completely take over the service sector, think again. Many of the robots CNBC visited at banks, restaurants, and stores in Tokyo were not fully embraced by consumers for their usefulness. Rather, they were seen as a novelty to play and interact with momentarily while waiting - but maybe entertainment is part of their purpose?

Two robots visited by CNBC had grabbed global headlines last year, but were now no longer in service: a humanoid robot at a department store and a train station robot meant to assist travelers. It wasn't clear from the human staff if the robots were removed because they were ineffective or if their original purpose was just testing.

Either way, robots aren't taking over the world - just yet.
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Here's why Japan is obsessed with robots

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Rarely a week passes without a headline about a new type of robot coming out of Japan. Whether they're making an evening cocktail, performing at a restaurant or combining cellphone communication with personal companionship - the hype is real in Japan.

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the guardian     “If the robots are coming for our jobs, make sure they pay their taxes” (26 February 2017)

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the guardian     “If the robots are coming for our jobs, make sure they pay their taxes” (26 February 2017)

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The problem with the future is that it's unknowable. But of course that doesn't stop us trying to second-guess it. At the moment, many people - and not just in the tech industry - are wondering about the impact of automation on employment. And not just blue-collar employment - the kind of jobs that were eliminated in the early phase of automating car production, for instance - but also the white-collar jobs that hitherto seemed secure.

In a much-cited 2013 study, for example, economists David Autor of MIT and David Dorn of Spain's CEMFI institute found that because computers could now be substituted for low-skill workers performing routine tasks (book-keeping, clerical work and repetitive production and monitoring activities) we were going to see a "hollowing-out" of middle-skilled, middle-wage jobs and "a corresponding rise in employment at both the high and low ends of the skills spectrum". And in a 2015 study, two Oxford researchers, Carl Frey and Mike Osborne, took the 702 categories that the US labour department uses to classify jobs and tried to estimate which of them might be vulnerable to automation using the "smart" technologies that are now commonplace. Their conclusion: almost half (47%).

Waves of automation have always involved periods of traumatic disruption

If these predictions are accurate, then there is trouble ahead because the existence of a stable middle class seems to be a prerequisite for a liberal democracy. But because of the aforementioned problem with the future, we don't know how immediate the threat of high-end automation is. It could be that getting to this particular future will take a lot longer than the technology's boosters and Cassandras think. But no one - with the possible exception of Donald Trump - doubts that it will happen.

The standard riposte to concerns about automation is to pooh-pooh them. This is an old story, sceptics contend. Anxiety about the rise of the machines goes back to Elizabeth I and the stocking frame. And each time the fears have been overblown: the new technology did indeed destroy jobs; but the new industries that it enabled eventually created even more jobs. So calm down: it will come good in the end.

And maybe it will. But there's still a problem. What both the boosters and the sceptics ignore is that waves of automation have always involved periods of traumatic disruption. In a fascinating recent article the economist Tyler Cowen pointed out the problem with blithe assumptions about a better future - they miss out on the history of what actually happened in the great industrial transformations of the past. "The shift out of agricultural jobs," he writes, "while eventually a boon for virtually all of humanity, brought significant problems along the way. This time probably won't be different, and that's why we should be concerned."

Estimates for private per-capita consumption from 1760 to 1831, for example, suggest that it rose only by about 22%. And Cowen cites estimates by the economic historian Gregory Clark that "English real wages may have fallen about 10% from 1770 to 1810, a 40-year period. Clark also estimates that "it took 60 to 70 years of transition, after the onset of industrialisation, for English workers to see sustained real wage gains at all".

Translate that to the present and you can see the dangers. If the people hitherto known as middle-class were to experience this kind of income suppression, we would expect political trouble. Yet, says Cowen, that may be the track the US is on. Median household income is down since 1999, and median male wages were probably higher in 1969 than they are today. His conclusion: transition costs from automation will be higher than many economists - and everyone in the tech industry - likes to think.

Then there is the question - also avoided by the tech industry - of who pays those transition costs. Conventional thinking says that the owners of the machines should reap the rewards, while the state picks up the costs of the ensuing human wreckage. So when Bill Gates pitched into the debate last week with a proposal that robots should be taxed, just like human workers are, you can imagine the splutters of outrage from the neoliberal fortresses of Silicon Valley. "Right now," he said, "the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think that we'd tax the robot at a similar level." And the money raised should be used to retrain people the robots have replaced, with "communities where this has a particularly big impact" first in line for support. I never thought I'd write this, but here goes: good for you, Mr Gates.
Topics

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If the robots are coming for our jobs, make sure they pay their taxes | John Naughton

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The problem with the future is that it's unknowable. But of course that doesn't stop us trying to second-guess it. At the moment, many people - and not just in the tech industry - are wondering about the impact of automation on employment.

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Fortune      “Bill Gates Is Wrong That Robots and Automation Are Killing Jobs”(Feb 25, 2017)

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Fortune      “Bill Gates Is Wrong That Robots and Automation Are Killing Jobs”(Feb 25, 2017)

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Bill Gates Is Wrong That Robots and Automation Are Killing Jobs

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James Bessen, a lecturer at Boston University's School of Law, says Bill Gates is wrong about his proposed robot tax slowing automation.

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QUARTZ      "The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates" (Feb 17, 2017)

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QUARTZ      "The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates" (Feb 17, 2017)

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https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/
https://youtu.be/nccryZOcrUg

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Bill Gates thinks the robot that takes your job should have to pay taxes.

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Reuters      “European parliament calls for robot law, rejects robot tax” (16 Feb, 2017)

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Reuters      “European parliament calls for robot law, rejects robot tax” (16 Feb, 2017)

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European lawmakers called on Thursday for EU-wide legislation to regulate the rise of robots, including an ethical framework for their development and deployment and the establishment of liability for the actions of robots including self-driving cars.

But they rejected a proposal to impose a so-called robot tax on owners to fund support for or retraining of workers put out of a job by robots.

The resolution is a recommendation to the bloc's executive, the European Commission, which the Commission is not obliged to follow but must give reasons if it chooses not to.

"The EU needs to take the lead on setting these standards, so as not to be forced to follow those set by third countries," the parliament said in a statement.

The decision to reject the robot tax was hailed by the robotics industry, which says it would stunt innovation.

"The IFR believes that the idea to introduce a robot tax would have had a very negative impact on competitiveness and employment," said the Frankfurt-based International Federation of Robotics.

The IFR and others argue that automation and the use of robots create new jobs by increasing productivity, and point to a correlation between robot density and employment in advanced industrial nations, for example in the German car industry.

Global shipments of industrial robots rose 15 percent in 2015, according to the latest statistics from the IFR, and were worth a total of about $46 billion. Demand for service robots for medical, domestic and personal use is also on the rise.

The parliamentary resolution on the amended report was passed by 396 votes to 123, with 85 abstentions.

The report's author, MEP Mady Delvaux, said she was disappointed that lawmakers "refused to take account of possible negative consequences on the job market".

"They rejected an open-minded and forward-looking debate and thus disregarded the concerns of our citizens," she said.

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industrial machinery and equipment (trbc)

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European parliament calls for robot law, rejects robot tax

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European lawmakers called on Thursday for EU-wide legislation to regulate the rise of robots, including an ethical framework for their development and deployment and the establishment of liability for the actions of robots including self-driving cars.

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Exhibition “Robots” at the Science Museum in London

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Exhibition “Robots” at the Science Museum in London

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https://beta.sciencemuseum.org.uk/robots/