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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 04 2016, @03:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the finally,-a-baby-you-can-play-pass-with...-literally! dept.

Toyota will sell a miniature version of the robot it sent to the International Space Station in 2013 to Japanese customers next year. The demand for robotic companions in Japan is expected to be strong due to an aging population, plummeting birthrate, and more adults choosing to live alone:

Toyota Motor Corp on Monday unveiled a doe-eyed palm-sized robot, dubbed Kirobo Mini, designed as a synthetic baby companion in Japan, where plummeting birth rates have left many women childless. Toyota's non-automotive venture aims to tap a demographic trend that has put Japan at the forefront of aging among the world's industrial nations, resulting in a population contraction unprecedented for a country not at war, or racked by famine or disease.

"He wobbles a bit, and this is meant to emulate a seated baby, which hasn't fully developed the skills to balance itself," said Fuminori Kataoka, Kirobo Mini's chief design engineer. "This vulnerability is meant to invoke an emotional connection." Toyota plans to sell Kirobo Mini, which blinks its eyes and speaks with a baby-like high-pitched voice, for 39,800 yen ($392) in Japan next year. It also comes with a "cradle" that doubles as its baby seat designed to fit in car cup holders.

The robot also requires a 300-yen ($2.95) monthly subscription.

Also at BBC, TechCrunch, and New York Magazine (nice headline).


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 04 2016, @12:46PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 04 2016, @12:46PM (#409958)

    They have too many people and too few jobs for them. They're undergoing a massive economic transition over the last decade or two, going from something kinda like pre-rust belt lifetime salary employment to something like post-industrial millennial experience of no employment or part time at best. Unfortunately much like in the USA the culture lags the economy by decades so kids are brought up to believe the one and only path to success is to be a salaryman at the factory for life, then you get the wife then she squirts out kids, etc. Culture has not caught up with the economic times where at least a third of the kids are part time / contract not lifelong salaryman and maybe 10 percent are hikkomori and basically live at home and stay out of trouble (if they were minority and lived in the USA they'd get into trouble and end up shot or in prison, but its not culturally acceptable, so they live in the basement and post to image boards all day).

    As a specific workplace example before the turn of the century they had legal protection from temp employees so unemployment was higher but those who had jobs at least could afford family, kids. That was all changed and now about a third of the population does temp/part time/contract work and can't afford family, kids.

    If that's not fun enough their macro economic system is a disaster and is basically a long slow "great depression" scenario. People call it the lost decades. They had kind of a "roaring 20s" in the 1980s back when they financial and real estate bubbled (like the USA now, kinda) and were going to rule the world, and they've been stuck in a great depression style slowdown ever since.

    So figure maybe half the young people population have been trained on a very strict disciplined cultural flowchart of do this then this then this and one of the "this" is squirting out kids, and when that flowchart no longer economically works due to lack of jobs, there will likely be a lack of babies as a result.

    Its kinda like being a millennial in the USA or to a lesser extent a gen-x-er, if you can get one of the good jobs this is a hell of a good time to be alive, of course for like 70% of the population without good jobs, they're kinda F-ed. Go to college, get a great job, get married, have kids, oh whoops no jobs after college, well, decades later there will be no kids. At least no kids from responsible/lucky adults. USA has plenty of irresponsible subcultures so we won't run out of kids, and Japan has none, so no kids for them.

    The only thing that could possibly make it worse is immigration, that could only possibly result in even more unemployed Japanese. And that's assuming the immigrants are a net gain which is ... optimistic. If you have an economy holding say, 7 jobs, and have 10 people needing jobs, the last thing you need to do is import more people. Unless you're trying to torture them, along the lines of "bomb japan again" or whatever. That's kinda inhumane to torture people for a whole lifetime of poverty and unemployment compared to a nice quick end in a nuclear fire, so yeah immigration is worse than a-bombs, in the long run. You can recover from a-bombs.

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  • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday October 04 2016, @01:44PM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @01:44PM (#409978) Journal

    > Its kinda like being a millennial in the USA or to a lesser extent a gen-x-er, if you can get one of the good jobs this is a hell of a good time to be alive,

    I dunno, I get the impression it's a pretty shitty time to be Japanese, no matter what. Seems you can be either an overworked salaryman who has a stable income but no time , energy or freedom to enjoy it (almost every waking hour being spent in service to the company) or to be an unemployed dependant who has plenty of free time but no money at all and a very low social status.

    Maybe if the Japanese employers didn't work their employees into the ground they could share the work around a bit more, thereby employing more people and helping the unemployment problem. They'd probably even find that the added productivity from increased morale actually pays for the cost of the new hires.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @02:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @02:02PM (#409985)

    If you have an economy holding say, 7 jobs, and have 10 people needing jobs, the last thing you need to do is import more people.

    That's based on the fallacy that the number of jobs is independent of the number of people. Immigrants not only can take jobs, they also can create jobs. The right thing to do is to figure out for different types of immigrants what is the relation of jobs taken to jobs created, and then allow immigrants that create more jobs than they take.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday October 04 2016, @06:54PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 04 2016, @06:54PM (#410201) Journal

      Japan is overcrowded, so the limitation isn't a fallacy the way it would be if there were lots of open space. When I lived there in the 1950's most people seemed to be "overworked", but not unhappy. This is no in-depth analysis. I was a pre-teen, and most people I saw were working in small companies, self-owned businesses, or small farms. I didn't seem much of the life in the larger cities. A few people were quite unhappy, but they were definitely "outsiders". Crazy people were sometimes left to roam the streets, and a few people lived in holes dug in the side of cliffs. So I had no encounters with "salarymen" or rich people. But most farms were extremely small, so small that when I looked back on them after coming back to the US (and getting a bit older) I was surprised they could support even a couple, much less a family.

      I also didn't experience the notable Japanese prejudice against foreigners. Well, that was during the US occupation, a cousin who moved to Japan later reported that the prejudice against foreigners is still strong, though not as strong against people from the US as against Koreans. Also I lived on Kyushu and she lived on northern Honshu...so perhaps there's a geographical difference.

      But Japan, at least the areas I saw, *is* densely overpopulated. They don't need immigrants. China has lots of open space in various badlands, but Japan is *much* more limited that way.

      --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @07:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @07:05PM (#410215)

    they're getting a lot of immigrants doing construction work. apparently japanese are not willing to take the jobs; the news has been talking about them having a labor shortage in the construction industry. it seems with their fine educations, they will not deign to do mere blue collar work.