Gloom rolls in
In East Asia, both China and Korea have mastered the technology, science, and art of breathing intelligence into robots. For the most part, Japan has not; and oddly, doesn’t seem to appreciate how important smart machines are to its global future.

Yes, the trade publications say the country is “scrambling” to correct the situation, but just what that scrambling entails is a major mystery.

“AI and robotics are not separable,” says Minoru Asada, an emeritus roboticist at Japan’s Osaka University. “Big changes happened, and we could not catch up.”

The result, these days Chinese AMRs are whizzing around Japanese warehouses, while Korean industrial robots are delivering smart robotics to its factories.

Worse for the Japanese economy as well as its national pride is this from Nikkei Asian Review: “Japan’s gross domestic product unexpectedly shrank for a second straight quarter, confirming that the nation’s economy has now slipped behind Germany to become the world’s fourth largest.”

Japan #4!

Meanwhile, the big picture of demographic decline looms ever larger as the country gets old and goes from gray to white, while the fertility rate continues to slump, and workers get scarce.

Factoid: The average age of Japanese farmers is 70!

Even seemingly little snags can unexpectedly haunt the economy. For example, unlimited overtime for truck drivers is going away (15-hour shifts, six or even seven days a week), which will put a major crimp in an already strained logistics industry. Solution: Need more drivers. Fact: Not enough available.

Japan’s problems make it a prime location for robot-driven automation. However, recent research in Nature and from the Oxford Martin School portray Japan’s industrial automation efforts as ranging anywhere from lagging to stagnating. Graeme Mcdonald at Citigroup points out the best automated factories in Japan are those that make robots: “Production at some of Japan’s leading robotics companies is already nearly fully automated.” But that automation doesn’t extend much beyond those robot factories.

Where to begin?
“An expectation that they would be the global leaders in robotics has not been fulfilled,” cautions Manuela Veloso, head of artificial intelligence (AI) research at investment bank JPMorgan Chase, and a professor emerita of computer science at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University.

Factoid: According to TechWire Asia: Japan will face a deficit of 789,000 software engineers by 2030.

Noriyuki Kojima, co-founder of Japanese startup Kotoba Technology: “Japan’s trailing position in the field of generative AI largely stems from its comparative shortcomings in deep learning and more extensive software development.”

“In the early 2000s the Prime Minister’s Cabinet offered Innovation 25, a policy initiative that said it would make Japan an “innovation” society by 2025. As that year approaches and with little to show for its efforts, Innovation 25  has recently given way to Society 5.0, another Cabinet Office initiative that defines a new societal iteration as: “A human-centered society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space.” 

Lots of money and a decade of R&D would seem to be the first order of business for Japan in order to dispel a bit of the gloom. Japan has precious little of the latter but an abundance of the former; maybe the government and the Bank of Japan need to pour billions of dollars into the problems, even if some large portion of it is squandered. China’s Xi Jinping, in a speech from 2015, called for a “robot revolution” in a nod to automation’s vital role in raising productivity. As it did with its steel industry and later with EVs, China lavished billions on robotics, and out came “Made in China 2025.”

See related:
China’s “Robot Dividend” Has Three Faces
Will China become the first of the fast-aging industrialized nations to transform a severe onrushing demographic decline into a robot dividend?