Asteroid retrieval by rotary rocket, by Jerome Pearson

>From your examples of robots perhaps you misunderstood what I meant by
"media darling Japanese robots", so just to be clear here is a
definition: a robot that has no practical purpose, is cute (resembling
a humanoid robot as imagined by classic science fiction or, in the
case of AIBO, resembling an animal) and often is exhaustively used by
the company that developed it as a means of self promotion in
conferences, presentations, expositions, etc (Asimo and the late Qrio
being the maximum exponents of that).

On 2/9/06, victoriatangoman wrote:
(...)
> Japan, pretty much alone in the world, is instituting a unique
> immigration policy to address the coming labor shortage - it's
> choosing to substitute robotics for immigrants. They're quite
> determined on this front.

I am well aware of that. Even in the early nineties it was possible to
hear Japanese scientists saying that their population was ageing and
so they would need a population of robots to take care of them. Since
every any other rich country with dramatic population aging in the
world (like those of Europe) deals with that by importing immigrants
(which at the same time will not leave the elderly without people to
help them and helps the aging problem itself), which are cheaper, as
well as vastly more intelligent, agile and smarter than any robot,
those statements of Japanese scientists sounded completely devoid of
practicality or even meaning, so there had to be an unspoken reason.
Considering the starking ethnic uniformity of the population of Japan
and some attitudes of them that sound xenophobic, that unspoken reason
is not so hard to find.

By the way, the quite natural immigrant solution remembers a genial
statement that a colleague of mine at university made when he was told
by the professor that "the classic ultimate goal of A.I. is to develop
a being with intelligence comparable to that of a human". My friend
replied that "If you want to create a being with intelligence
comparable to that of a human, you only have to make sex" ;-). Another
statement, made more recently by a workmate of me, goes in the same
lines: "The old dream of an all-powerful A.I. that would receive any
problem from humans and then would spit a working solution was finally
brought to reality when India decided to do outsourcing" ;-).

That brings another problem (besides intrinsic technical difficulties)
for development of human-equivalent robots: taking aside Japan, there
is no real market need for them, and so little incentive for
commercial research on them. (On the other hand, there is enormous
commercial incentive to A.I. research about how to mine the infinite
chaos of information that humans produce nowadays, as Google and - to
a lesser extent - biotech companies demonstrate.) I wonder if the
Japanese will achieve their dream of a new race of humanoid mechanical
slaves in time or if they will simply start giving up and try to bear
immigrants.

(...)
> Here's the Economist on Japan's robot affinity:
>
> http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5323427&no_na_tran=1
(...)

Interesting article, though it seems overly optimistic when it says
that "Japanese have the technology for that". The fact that two of the
robots hailed in the article as the beginning of a new era - Qrio and
Aibo - were "put to sleep for good" by Sony less than a year after the
article does not look a good augury either.