Thread: Robots may help plug 3.5 million job gaps (in Japan)

A car-fuelling robot , equipped with a camera, fills up a car in Emmeloord, central Netherlands. Photo / Reuters

Robots may help plug 3.5 million job gaps

5:00AM Saturday April 12, 2008

Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in ageing Japan by 2025, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks.

Japan faces a 16 per cent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the Government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.

The Machine Industry Memorial Foundation said robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.

Rather than each robot replacing one person, the foundation said in a report that robots could make time for people to focus on more important things.

Japan could save 2.1 trillion ($26.72 billion) of elderly insurance payments in 2025 by using robots that monitor the health of older people, so they don't have to rely on human nursing care, the foundation said.

The current fertility rate is 1.3 babies per woman, far below the level needed to maintain the population, while 40 per cent of the population will be over 65 by 2055.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/sto ... d=10503653

American (and other advanced nation) workers are routinely replaced by automation. How many bank tellers lost out to ATM machines? Most parking lots use some kind of automatic payment system. In manufacturing a lot of work is done by specialized, computerized equipment. We now have lengthy telephone menus to put up with. Self service gas station with convenience markets seem to be the norm now. All of these were mechanized methods that eliminated workers and increased profits.

Americans are conditioned to accept technological change and economic dislocation as the norm of living in a progressive society. I guess the illegal aliens haven't heard this, because they sure have been quick to holler (and sue) when their little nest egg is threatened. Grafting them into the organized labor system, where people can be protected ad absurdum, just reinforces their hold in our culture. We would not have had American farms pulling out of the US and relocating if agricultural mechanization had proceeded at a normal pace over the last thirty years. Now US farms are becoming less competitive every year and we are stuck with a huge population of up in-arms farmworkers.

Plus, the robots wouldn't clog the emergency rooms.