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Robotics, automation helping alleviate labor shortage

6 Comments
By Leika Kihara and Kaori Kaneko

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6 Comments
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This shoots a hole in many posters', "Lets breed like rabbits or Humanity will be destroyed" Doomsday predictions.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Robotics are part of todays society, and you can't stop progress, but doesn't social conscience have a say in all this. We are always hearing about labour shortages, ballooning social welfare, ageing population, health care costs,falling population so much negativity spouted by inept politicians. The truth rarely gets published ie: youth unemployment,the homeless,those living on wages below poverty levels, struggling families trying to make ends meet.rising costs to the consumer .So this is were social conscience comes in, for every robot used in the place of an employable person, that robot should be made to pay its national insurance and tax just like its human counterpart. People on here will think I'm crazy, but look at the profits those companies using robotics make, look at the dividends paid to shareholders ??, who do they care about ?? We can't stop progress, and some of that progress is simply amazing, but society has to find a balance, something that politicians and the business community are missing at the moment.

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Minello...and look at the cost of each machine and maintenance. You cannot morally charge a robot with health insurance etc. But I understand what you are getting at.

I look at robotics as a nice way to keep out foreign workers. Is that morally correct? Not sure, but you know how Japan wants to stay pure.

The underemployed probably would not want the job the robot is doing. They can make choices. Robots cannot.

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minello7,

In some ideal future, we can imagine that having to work will be an option. Yet we are still stuck with the mindset that unemployment is a problem. Switching that thinking would require huge political and social changes. But your notion of taxing robots is interesting and not completely crazy. I've read some ideas that suggest paying everyone a minimum wage whether they work or not. This would replace current welfare benefits and state pension schemes. It would require a large change in current taxation systems and wealth distribution. Such changes might include taxation on production, which is perhaps not so different from your idea.

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Labor shortages don't occur if a country is dying. Japan is probably doing much better than the MSM generally says. Why allow in millions of foreign workers when the same policy in the West has been a disaster? Robots don't eat, sleep or need days off.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

In addition to the monetary advantages of hiring robots - like no need for pension or health insurance, robots don't come with the extra baggage that humans posses like dishonesty, corruption, insubordination, unwanted habits, inaccuracy, and plain simple human errors due many factors like fatigue and depression. I don't believe in biological macro evolution but I do think humans are evolving in intelligence and creativity. So I do see the trend towards shifting more and more of the boring repetitive jobs from humans to robots and automatons. Then humans can free themselves to work on the more challenging and interesting jobs like R&D, design, making content, and building robots.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

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