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In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

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Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

#11

Post by maerF0x0 »

epolanski wrote: post #7
maerF0x0 wrote: post #5

"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today. A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training. (Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unempl…

18% is one of the.lowest rates on the planet. 4th in fact. This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.

It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw)

Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.

Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

#12

Post by ceejayoz »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #11
epolanski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18% is one of the.lowest rates on the planet. 4th in fact. This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.

It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw) Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.

Why would the retirees want to be put back to work?

Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once?

Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task?

Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed?

There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.

Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

#13

Post by epolanski »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #11
epolanski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18% is one of the.lowest rates on the planet. 4th in fact. This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.

It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw) Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.

Japan has one of the lowest unemployments on the planet, 2.5%.

Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't.

As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.

Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

#14

Post by seanmcdirmid »

chaostheory wrote: post #8
maerF0x0 wrote: post #5

"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today. A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training. (Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unempl…

1. There is only so much you can pay the people doing the kind of work like cleaning the Shinkansens or manning the 7-11's because it affects customer costs. i.e. There's a point where you increase the salary of 7-11 workers that it causes a $2 fried chicken snack to inflate to $10 that customers will refuse to buy 2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of wo…

Different from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.

Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

#16

Post by pj_mukh »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #11
epolanski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18% is one of the.lowest rates on the planet. 4th in fact. This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.

It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw) Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.

I don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job.

If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.

Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

#17

Post by alephnerd »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #5

"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today. A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training. (Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unempl…

No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan.

Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.

Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.

They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.

Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.

Edit: can't reply

> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film

It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.

> NYC sanitation dept...

Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.

Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.

> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there

What's with this kind of orientalism?!?

Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.

And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a Teidai/Sokei/Hitotsubashi/TokyoTech/Ivy/Stanford, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters.

There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].

[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...

[1] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf

[2] - https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/11d033af448e404c3f5...

Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

#18

Post by alephnerd »

eucryphia wrote: post #15

The job no one wants? Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35. Who’s paying for your nursing home? Tax the robot’s income? Will your demographic replacements vote for that?

> Who’s paying for your nursing home

Japanese financial institutions massive capital positions across Asia, the US, and Europe which tend to be public-private ventures.

> Tax the robot’s income

Pretty much, in the sense that corporations and the Japanese government have spent decades working together to build a sovereign wealth model comparable to Singapore and the UAE's.

Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants

#19

Post by Apreche »

It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?

The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.

Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.

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