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Onuki, a 31-year-old salesman, is headed to the train station to catch the 12:24 a.m. train, the last one of the night, back to his home in Yokohama. The train will quickly fill up with other professional working men.
At about 1:30 a.m., after having made a pit stop at a convenience store to grab a sandwich, Onuki arrives home. When he opens the bedroom door, he accidentally wakes his wife, Yoshiko, who just recently fell asleep after working an 11-hour day. She chides him for making too much noise and he apologizes.
Then, with his food still digesting and his alarm set for 7 a.m., he creeps into bed, ready to do it all again tomorrow.
Over the past two decades, stories like the Onukis' have become commonplace in Japan. Young couples are fighting to make relationships work amid a traditional work culture that expects men to be breadwinners and women to be homemakers. It's a losing battle. Many newlyweds are forced to watch their free time disappear, surrendering everything from the occasional date night to starting a family.
The daily constraints have made for a worrisome trend. Japan has entered a vicious cycle of low fertility and low spending that has led to trillions in lost GDP and a population decline of 1 million people, all within just the past five years. If left unabated, experts forecast severe economic downturn and a breakdown in the fabric of social life.
"Adult diapers have outsold baby diapers in Japan for the last six years."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:53AM (1 child)
Yeah. Cheers to lazy and soft people like me.
There's always someone out there willing to work harder and longer, and suffer more. But we shouldn't be aiming for a world where there has to be more and more such people.
We should be aiming for a world where there can be more lazy and soft people like me (you're not forced to be lazy but you can be if you want). Let non-sentient robots[1] do the hard work.
If you think that would be so terrible go look at Greece of the old days and imagine the slaves doing most of the work weren't slaves but robots instead.
Better than aiming for a future where the 1% enjoy it and the 99% suffer.
[1] Stop trying to build sentient robots (esp if you're not sure whether what you're doing would create sentience or not). The idea is to reduce suffering not increase it.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:05PM
> Stop trying to build sentient robots
It's a bugbear of mine. AI is not about sentient robots, and no AI is sentient or will be in foreseeable future. AI is about making computers that can perform optimisations based on heuristic data.