Land of the Rising Robots

• Author: Todd Schneider, Gee Hee Hong, and Anh Van Le
• Pages: 28-31

28 FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT | June 2018

While automation will eliminate very

few occupations entirely in the

coming decades, it is likely to have

an impact on portions of almost all

jobs to some degree—depending on the type of work

and the tasks involved. Set to move beyond routine

and repetitive manufacturing activities, automation

has the potential to appear in a much broader range

of activities than seen until now, and to redene

human labor and work style in services and other

sectors. In Japan, the rapid decline in the labor

force and the limited inux of immigrants create

a powerful incentive for automation, which makes

the country a particularly useful laboratory for the

study of the future landscape of work.

Vanishing act

Japan’s estimated population fell by a record-breaking

264,000 people in 2017. Currently, deaths out-

number births by an average of 1,000 people a

day. e Tohoku region in northern Japan, for

example, now has fewer inhabitants than it did in

1950. Japan’s birth rate has long been signicantly

below the 2.1 births a woman needed to sustain

The latest version of Sony’s

robotic puppy Aibo, released

in early 2018, has artif‌icial

intelligence capabilities.

Japan’s combination of artif‌icial intelligence and robotics

may be the answer to its rapidly shrinking labor force, but

will this be good news or bad for human labor?

Todd Schneider, Gee Hee Hong, and Anh Van Le

Land of the Rising

ROBOTS

PHOTO: GET TY IMAGE S / KYODO NE WS