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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

#151

Post by autoexec »

j-bos wrote: post #144
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…

It seems to be human nature to chase after easy to understand solutions rather than addressing ifficult bottlenecks and friction. Doctors are a great example. In order to be a doctor, you have to study for 12 years. But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade. Then on top of that, you have the limited spaces for residents…

> But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade.

There's a lot of value in knowing about more than just one thing. Anyone leaving their university with a degree should have at least some exposure to topics outside of the field they want to work in. People are more than just their jobs, having a well rounded education is useful, and matters outside of the field of medicine still have real impacts on the lives of doctors.

I'd certainly feel better about going to a doctor who has a reasonable baseline understanding of the rest of the world outside of his work. You could argue that people looking to become doctors should able to avoid some percentage of the other classes they're forced to take, but doctors can often pick up some relevant credits while still fulfilling those requirements too.

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

#152

Post by ericd »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #116
ericd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens, but it's not representative. Interesting belief, it seems like it should be self-extinguishing, the cultures that don't believe this kind of thing will tend to take over over time.

Most of the world is below replacement rate (~2.1 TFR), the rest will get there in a decade or two. Educated, empowered women delay having children, have less children, or no children. Holds across both developed and developing countries. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/15/5-facts-a... https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert...

Right, it looks pretty catastrophic for some areas (eg South Korea) if it doesn’t stabilize.

But I’m also skeptical of anything that extrapolates anything related to human behavior out 75 years.

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

#153

Post by array_key_first »

alex43578 wrote: post #128
01100011 wrote: post #58

Japan is in a demographic decline. They need all the robots they can get.

All developed countries are in demographic decline (ex immigration), and need automation/robotics. There's only so many immigrants you can import before you lose your country's identity.

> There's only so many immigrants you can import before you lose your country's identity.

Is this true? The US has been doing this for over 100 years and it's been fine, I think. I mean, our countries identity has basically become "we're all immigrants" but that's not a new phenomena.

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

#154

Post by NitpickLawyer »

renewiltord wrote: post #149
j-bos wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be human nature to chase after easy to understand solutions rather than addressing ifficult bottlenecks and friction. Doctors are a great example. In order to be a doctor, you have to study for 12 years. But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade. Then on top of that, you have the limited spaces for residents…

That’s a North American quirk.

Maybe the particularities, but there are overall issues with placing in EU as well. There's a big discrepancy in general practice availability between large cities / capitals and smaller cities / country side. And it's not necessarily a lack of "living wages" nor is it poor conditions (often they'll have strong support from local municipalities w/ things like clinic space, local community support, etc) but it's simply that younger doctors don't want to move there.

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

#155

Post by toomuchtodo »

ericd wrote: post #152
toomuchtodo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the world is below replacement rate (~2.1 TFR), the rest will get there in a decade or two. Educated, empowered women delay having children, have less children, or no children. Holds across both developed and developing countries. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/15/5-facts-a... https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert...

Right, it looks pretty catastrophic for some areas (eg South Korea) if it doesn’t stabilize. But I’m also skeptical of anything that extrapolates anything related to human behavior out 75 years.

Once you hit ~1.5 TFR, low fertility trap kicks in.

> Demographers in the early 2000s coined the “low-fertility trap,” hypothesizing that a series of self-reinforcing economic and social mechanisms make it increasingly difficult to raise the fertility rate once it dips below a certain threshold. The academics posited that lower fertility results in increased individual aspirations for personal consumption but at the same time it also results in an aging population and less job creation—and thus greater pessimism about the economic future—which in turn disincentivizes having more children. Moreover, as the average family size grows smaller and smaller generation after generation, the social norm of an ideal family size shrinks, too. These forces together lead to a persistent “downward spiral” for the fertility rate that can be impossible to reverse.

> China’s not the only country in the region or the world facing this kind of demographic crisis. Fertility rates across developed nations globally have almost uniformly dropped over the last few decades. China’s neighbors Japan and South Korea have among the lowest, and policymakers there have invested billions of dollars and pondered uniquely targeted policies, respectively, to try—so far unsuccessfully—to get young people to have more children.

https://time.com/6306151/china-low-fertility-trap-birth-rate...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2005...

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

#156

Post by PearlRiver »

jjmarr wrote: post #44
alephnerd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Westerne…

There's a subreddit for the NYC sanitation dept because it's so competitive to get into. https://www.reddit.com/r/DSNY/comments/1rwayil/what_was_the_... People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics. All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Man…

Trash collection is not even all that dirty in a developed first world country.

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

#158

Post by ericd »

areoform wrote: post #123
ericd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens, but it's not representative. Interesting belief, it seems like it should be self-extinguishing, the cultures that don't believe this kind of thing will tend to take over over time.

Most women have watched someone go through a difficult pregnancy in their lives before they hit 20. It's not a "belief" for the people who live through it. People used to die – frequently – from this "belief." And women still do.

The belief I was talking about was that that was at all representative of the median case, and the implication that it’s not worth the risk to have kids (this was before you added the big chunk about mortality being 4-10% in places without a good medical system). I have first hand experience of some of the potential difficulties, so I know it happens, but I also know that it’s not every pregnancy, most are fine, and that if you do have difficulty, a high quality healthcare system can usually get you through it.

And this belief is interesting, because it seems like one of the most evolutionarily unfit ideas possible, at least on the individual level. But maybe it’s good for the survival of the group if it decreases resource contention.

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

#159

Post by renewiltord »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #154
renewiltord wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a North American quirk.

Maybe the particularities, but there are overall issues with placing in EU as well. There's a big discrepancy in general practice availability between large cities / capitals and smaller cities / country side. And it's not necessarily a lack of "living wages" nor is it poor conditions (often they'll have strong support from local municipalities w/ things like clinic space, local community support, etc) but it's simpl…

I should have done better with my comment. I intended to reference the pre-med undergraduate degree.
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