I went to a Japanese cultural exhibit at the Kennedy Center. The crowd pleasing favorites were the robots. This guy rolls around answering questions in a chipper voice and shaking hands:
He’d make a great politician if his answers were a little more vague.
This robot, made by Toyota, plays the trumpet using a complicated air pump system and lips that mimic those of a human:
Yes, he (she? it?) actually played the trumpet by blowing air into the instrument and pressing the valves with his fingers. He leaned and swayed side to side and backwards like a real musician getting caught up in the emotions of playing a song. He blasted out a couple of pop songs from the 1970s and a Disney tune. The sound was good and not as stilted or mechanical as I expected. A trumpet playing robot is pretty amazing but it’s not yet at the point where it can capture the fluidity and sensuality of a human master musician. Still, I tapped my feet.
A robot baby seal serves as a therapeutic aid to nursing home residents and sick children:
Aw, those soulful eyes. Guess what. If you scratch its face it will turn to the side you are scratching to look at you in appreciation and purr. You can feel the vibrations of the purr if you put your hand on its neck, just like a cat. Touch its whiskers and it makes an annoyed yip and turns away. Stroke its back and it will show its approval with a tail wag and squeals of delight. The makers of this $3500 toy say the noises the seal makes are an exact replica of the noises made by real baby seals in the wild. I asked if it came packaged with a club; the seal growled and a machine gun barrel protruded from its mouth. I moved on.
This is how the robot baby seal feeds recharges:
Check out the pacifier-shaped connectors. The Japanese are weird. If this had been a German product, the plug would’ve been in the ass.
Hmm, now what does this robot remind me of?
They’re coming!
What I learned from this cultural exchange:
-
The Japanese are really smart.
-
It says something stereotypical about the Japanese that they are leading the robot revolution.
-
The Japanese are confronting their demographic implosion and xenophobia head-on by investing in robots instead of importing tens of millions of antagonistic peasants to do the work that Japanese just won’t do.
-
We should be opening the borders to cute Japanese girls in pleated skirts and knee high stockings.
-
Americans should be ashamed we are falling way behind the robotics race.
-
Americans are no longer ashamed of things that are worthy of shame.
-
The Japanese understand that a society of robots is superior to a society of lawyers.
-
It would not surprise me if an unmarried Japanese-American man were the first to invent a sexbot.
-
The robot in the last photo is hotter than 80% of American women.
-
I’d tap that.
I read a Japanese manga recently called Absolute Boyfriend, the basic premise of which was the main character, a female, bought a sex robot boyfriend online, and he was better than all the real guys. It was written by a Japanese woman, who is quite a prolific manga artist. Seemingly the women in Japan want these bots as much as the men do.
They also have a fascination with the concept of robots gaining consciousness, posing as “real” humans and eventually warring humanity due to inevitable poor treatment. The Animatrix, released after The Matrix, was originally written and produced in Japanese because the audience simply couldn’t get enough of it.
LikeLike
Japan’s indigenous Shinto beliefs, which are animistic, embrace the notion that objects even artificial ones can possess souls. That has greatly influenced the country’s embrace of all things robotic particularly the anthropomorphic kind. In the west, souls are the province of human beings only, so simulacra are virtually anathema. In fact, I think the west has a somewhat subtle yet pervasive fear of artificial intelligence. Perhaps it’s the idea that it might supplant us.
LikeLike
This is because in America too many promising minds are squandered by entering the field of law and subsequently those minds atrophy. U.S. has 5% of world population but like 60% of lawyers. Ratio of engineers to lawyers graduated each year in Japan: 10 to 1. Ratio of engineers to lawyers graduated each year in the U.S. is the reverse: 1 to 10.
LikeLike
2050
LikeLike
No scat-bots nor bukkake-bots?
LikeLike
I’d tap that
.
Check out this
And this whole philosophy is based on Kurzweil Philosophy
Go Singularity!
Hey, at least the robots will be vegetarian and non-religious!
LikeLike
Whenever I think of a future with lovebots, I instantly think of BladeRunner’s Nexus-6 replicants.
T, its worse. Almost 60% of PhD students in engineering are foreign born. Half of our physicists are foreign born.
I was recently asked at a dinner party, other than the coming fiscal crisis what is the most pressing problem we face in this country? I responded, lawyers. They laughed….I didn’t.
LikeLike
1 Hope – the Japanese secretly want to be dominated by Godzilla
2- Robots are no good! *according to my recently raped Roomba
3 We still have the best Lawyerbot – Nancy Grace
4- but same-Robot sex will be banned
5 how about puke-bots for your tasteless post?
6 Regular robots will take over the world – but first they will kill all lawyerbots
LikeLike
If engineers got paid more than big-shot CEOs, higher-up managers, corporate lawyers and investment bankers, and if they got more respect from people, you’d see lots more guys flocking to that field. It isn’t as if statistics and economics courses are that much funner than math and physics.
It’s all about incentives and rewards. A lot of the young nerds that would have gone to engineering now are doing comp sci and coming out making Internet start-ups. They are all over the place, and have only the ambition of making it big as the next Google or Amazon. Very rarely do nerds these days talk about engineering and hardware electronics… it’s all programming and web technologies.
Then again, programming is rapidly being outsourced as well. Pretty soon America will just have a bunch of lawyers and managers.
LikeLike
I’m not talking about CEOs, managers, investment bankers and the like. Those are jobs I respect, and they tend to require some type of hard skill, like advanced math, statistics, etc. I’m talking about law specifically. A lot of people just go into it because they graduate college with no idea what to do with themselves, and law looks like an easy way to make lots of money without having to actually learn anything difficult. I wouldn’t lump in statistics and economics with law.
LikeLike
Actually Hope, I agree with you on one thing, too many managers can become a problem too. Just nowhere near on the level of the too many lawyers problem. As much as I hate losing American engineers, I’d hate losing American managers too.
LikeLike
She’d be hotter than 90% of American women if she ditched the geisha outfit and let her hair down.
LikeLike
Lawyers don’t really produce much, and they don’t really seem to be protecting us either. They do earn alot.
They are mostly “used” by the the people with the most capital to control markets and opportunities so that they have more for themselves. Bad lawyers keep rigging the system. They rig it with lawyer talk that rings fairness like armor – so the population is fenced off from the level playing fields. That is why everything seems so crooked.
Look what happened to “truth in advertising” laws
Look at derivatives
Remember the Savings and Loan fiasco? 400billion?
That was done through the selective non-enforcement of existing laws by the previous Bush government. All taxpayers which means all Americans except the ultra-wealthy paid the 400 billion in taxes. W. Bush shouldn’t have gotten in because of his dad’s S & L crisis track record.
But they manipulate public opinion in large part using “alpha” techniques. And they directly manipulate the vote – like in Florida – and no lawyers helped America out in that one.
The same thing now with this Bush. He was a fuckup drunk.
Now we have S & L 2 – more lending corruption and foreclosures are common again. Guess who will pay the bill? WE will. Everybody* reading this blog will.
*except for robots
LikeLike
sestamibi – robopimp says let’s see the green
LikeLike
I’m not talking about CEOs, managers, investment bankers and the like. Those are jobs I respect
Like I said, there are a ton of them, and if engineers got the same kind of respect and pay, you’d see a lot of engineers just like you see a lot of CEOs, managers and investment bankers.
LikeLike
One reason why Japan has a much higher engineer to lawyer ratio is that their IQ profile is heavily tilted toward visual-spatial skills, while they’re mediocre or a bit worse in verbal skills. Europeans tend to be balanced.
That will naturally push a larger fraction of East Asians into engineering and away from law. So we’d have to take that into account to see if, in the US, more potential engineers became actual lawyers.
At my personal blog, I showed that the Japanese are far more likely than other East Asian groups to become top ballet dancers. They’re just more curious and exciting than the more static Chinese.
LikeLike
Well let’s get one thing straight. There aren’t that many CEOs running around, and even fewer qualified to run a large corporate. The skill sets and experience to become qualified takes many years and depends on the industry, you don’t just go to college and come out becoming a CEO. In fact many start out as engineers especially at tech companies. GE’s Jeff Immelt got his degree in Applied Math from Darthmouth’s engineering school. Jack Welch, the former CEO has a PhD in ChemE. Intel’s former CEO Andy Grove and Craig Barrett were also engineers. Do I even need to mention Google.
LikeLike
This I can agree with. However, unlike the surplus of lawyers, I don’t think having a lot of CEOs, managers and investment bankers are inherently a bad thing. I’d like more American engineers, but not if it was at a heavy cost to our investment bankers, economists, managers and CEOs who actually employ the people. Can you imagine what life would be like if a vast majority of the management in America was foreign-based for example? The excess lawyers on the other hand actually have a tangible negative impact: they don’t produce anything, but on top of that they stifle existing production with red tape, excessive litigation, plaintiff’s suits that don’t actually benefit the plaintiffs, just the plaintiffs firms that initiate them, they write indecipherable laws that you have to then pay other lawyers to decipher, they penalize innovation and make people afraid to try new things for fear of being sued. As one of my professors said, they are the sand in the gears of the machine called capitalism.
LikeLike
I also think that in the US there is a lot less stigma involved in openly admitting you suck at math. A lot of people almost wear it as a badge of honor or don’t even try to succeed at math. Math curriculums have also been dumbed down to nurture a lot of kids’ self-esteem in public schools. I think if the US was more rigorous about demanding math skills from students and adults, we’d be better at it.
LikeLike
Law has its purpose in a capitalist society. People need to know that property rights and intellectual property rights exist. Otherwise, people would be afraid to innovate and create things because someone else may come along and steal them and the inventor would have no protection or remedy. Someone can take your house and you’d be powerless. Crime and fraud would run rampant and people would have no recourse or protection. But when the balance of lawyers to innovators and pioneers gets as far out of whack as it is in the US, you have more lawyers than are actually needed to perform this valuable social function. Ideally, lawyers go from protecting human and property rights and encouraging people to innovate comfortably without fear of exploitation. Instead at their current numbers, lawyers now create their own work in the form of excessive litigation, frivolous suits, borderline corporate extortion, and overly complicated laws that are a mess to untangle.
Some argue we need lawyers to be great legislators and draft and interpret laws and make things run smoothly, but even there I disagree. The single greatest piece of legislation ever drafted, the Constitution, was drafted by a handful of farmers and tradesman and it still stands today and is the most emulated, straightforward and admired piece of legislation around the world. Meanwhile the E.U. is trying to draft it’s own constitution using a bunch of lawyers and it has a 200-page indecipherable, complicated train wreck on its hands.
LikeLike
There aren’t that many CEOs running around, and even fewer qualified to run a large corporate.
There are quite a few CEOs of small corporations running around. I’ve met more of those types than engineers. Large, public corporate CEOs are of course rarer, but I wasn’t really talking about the Fortune 500.
This I can agree with. However, unlike the surplus of lawyers, I don’t think having a lot of CEOs, managers and investment bankers are inherently a bad thing.
Too many managers is a bad thing as far as I’ve experienced (from the perspective of a cube monkey — “too many chiefs, not enough Indians”). I have seen too many shitty managers that know nothing about the field (this is especially bad in IT) and make horrible business decisions without consulting those with knowledge.
My current manager is amazing, because he was promoted from the position of a real worker. He has real ability and knowledge, and can handle people and technology. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be too many managers like him around.
I think if the US was more rigorous about demanding math skills from students and adults, we’d be better at it.
Exactly. Too bad the ego and kids’ self-esteems are placed above all else. I remember just how hard I was pushed in math in my Chinese schooling. I was at least 2 full years ahead of American math schooling when I came here, but then I rapidly fell behind because the rigor was not imposed on me. I had to teach myself how to code rather than learn it in a 35k+/year private university.
LikeLike
The math issue was a big one for me because I really did “suck” at math. What to do if you fall into that category? Well, some people tell themselves that they’d rather become good lawyers making lots of money than mediocre (at best) engineers earning very little. I thought about law school, but decided there were too many lawyers in the world already. So I went for academia instead. Not too many jobs available there either, but at least I could learn more about things I really wanted to understand.
I do think, however, that there ought to be better ways of teaching math in school. I don’t believethe old way was very effective: it alienated many people who might at least have acquired a competency in the field, if not real mastery. But the new, politically corrected teaching methods sound absurd to me, if what I’ve read about them is accurate.
LikeLike
Alias,
I think the problem isn’t just sucking at math. If one sucks at math, and I mean sincerely lacks the aptitude for it, they should by all means go into another field they can be the best in. With law though, too many people who can’t do math just go into that field because they are desperate for status, security and money and don’t have much imagination to look for a career that suits them, so they run down a cliched list of things they have absolutely no passion for: “Medicine? Scratch that. Can’t do science, don’t have the undergrad grades or background. Engineer? Scratch that. Can’t do physics and math, don’t have the coursework. Computers? Scratch that. Intimidate me. Business, accounting, economics? Scratch that. More of that math. I know what I can do and still have status, I can do LAW!”
I just wish we could steer American kids toward more of the fields Americans are underrepresented in, but I hear part of the problem too is that there aren’t even enough good TEACHERS out there for teaching technical skills to young kids (NY public schools for example I had a major shortage of math and science teachers I believe).
LikeLike
I disagree. Engineers and scientists’ jobs are already being outsourced overseas by management. There’s no reason to push more kids into these dying fields. Looks like, as Half Sigma says, we live in a marketing economy, and finding new ways to sell people stuff is what the US is good at.
LikeLike
The Japanese are seemingly obsessed with A.I. Almost every single anime has it in there somewhere.
LikeLike
The thing is, is that law salaries are starting to go down with the flood of lawyers in the market and corporations making cuts to compete with companies in Asia.
Plus, there are many people who go to school, get the law degree, and after a few years ending up doing something totally different because they realize they are miserable in law doing paperwork for soulless corporations.
Divorce lawyers really seem to be down there in the bottom of the bunch, while I put ACLU lawyers actually in the realm of keeping the government honest (even if I rarely agree with their leftist ideology).
Check out the Tucker Max message board on this topic.
Most of my best friends are attorneys so I hear first hand about the student loans they are STILL paying off at 38; the huge houses and Mercedes’ they purchased well beyond their means to “keep up with the Joneses” (aka every other attorney in the firm); the misery that is their ongoing marriages; the ridiculous hours; ice cold dinners; the utter lack of originality in their conversations; etc., etc., etc. Listening to these woes sucks the energy out of me everytime they come up. The most common nugget I hear: “Why, God WHY did I choose this profession?”
There was actually an article in the times awhile back about the lack of lawyers in Japan.
My friend has a relative in law school, that is there to specifically study international human rights law (from a law school ranked 20-50). Was it cruel for me not to say anything, to let her continue the delusion that she’s actually going to be working on human rights when she graduates as opposed to paying off her gigantic loans? Oh well, she wouldn’t have listened anyway.
LikeLike
T, Not to sound too much like a pedantic librarian-bot, but the US Constitution wasn’t drafted by a handful of farmers and tradesmen but by a group of <55 men, most of whom were lawyers. Also, the overwhelmingly majority of the entire body –and on this part I’m just guessing, had been educated in the classical tradition. So we’re really talking apples and oranges to compare those guys to the farmers and tradesmen, or even lawyers, of today.
LikeLike
CZ – you are probably right about the classical education, as well as apples and oranges. Bad example on my part.
LikeLike
The Japanese are keen on developing robots because they’ll need them to care for their aging population. There aren’t going to be enough people around to handle the old folks. They are explicitly working on designs that will make older people feel comfortable – like the seal.
LikeLike
I have 4 good friends from my school days, three of whom became engineers (one electrical, one mechanical and one nuclear) and one became a lawyer.
Two of the engineers both went into sales, and they are doing well but not wealthy. The nuclear engineer spends most of his time in Europe, as his job is to design and build poiwer plants, which we’ve decided we don’t need here in the US.
The lawyer? He went into personal injury law, spends about 6 hours a day in the office, talking on the phone to insurance companies some of the time but mostly cruising the Net. He pulls in between $250-300K per annum with no heavy lifting, and he’s looking for a young lawyer to take over his practice because he’s looking to retire at the ripe old age of 53!
LikeLike
Mafia dons, drug lords and extortionists make a lot of money too. Doesn’t mean they’re good for the status of a country, a culture or society in general. The debate here was not about whether you’d make a lot of money as a lawyer, it’s about whether you are a cancer on society. I think personal injury lawyers are. It was never a debate about money.
LikeLike