Japanese Convenience Stores Are Hiring Robots Run By Workers in the Philippines (restofworld.org) 61
Filipino workers in Manila are remotely operating robots that restock convenience store shelves across Tokyo. The partnership represents a new economic model where physical labor can be offshored through telepresence. Around 60 workers at Astro Robotics monitor the machines and intervene when problems occur about 4% of the time. They earn between $250 and $315 per month. Japan faces severe labor shortages but has resisted expanding immigration. Offshoring the work through robots solves this while dramatically reducing costs.
Filipino workers are also training the AI systems designed to eliminate the need for human operators entirely. Tokyo-based Telexistence has collected extensive data from its workers and is providing it to a San Francisco startup building fully autonomous robots. The combination of automation and offshoring creates what one University of Michigan professor called a "double whammy" for workers in developed nations. It also exploits workers in developing countries who build the tools meant to replace them. The market for AI agents is expected to grow eightfold to $43 billion by 2030. Human-only work is forecast to drop 27% over the next five years.
Filipino workers are also training the AI systems designed to eliminate the need for human operators entirely. Tokyo-based Telexistence has collected extensive data from its workers and is providing it to a San Francisco startup building fully autonomous robots. The combination of automation and offshoring creates what one University of Michigan professor called a "double whammy" for workers in developed nations. It also exploits workers in developing countries who build the tools meant to replace them. The market for AI agents is expected to grow eightfold to $43 billion by 2030. Human-only work is forecast to drop 27% over the next five years.
Quoting Robert Crumb's Brother Charles (Score:1)
How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure.
Re:Quoting Robert Crumb's Brother Charles (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the Filipino workers being 'exploited,' this gives them an employment opportunity they didn't have before. What's bad about it? It sounds like easy work.
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I don't know which part of North America you're in but in the US said "rampant crime" is a right wing myth https://www.pewresearch.org/sh... [pewresearch.org] .
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You are daft. Rampant has a meaning. There is not "rampant crime" in America.
Pretty sure you are a right wing goon.
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That is was more rampant in the past is of little consolation to the victims today and dismissing their concerns out of hand probably is not helping you politically there either.
The only thing I'm dismissing is your fear mongering.
Pointing out idiots are exaggerating a problem isn't the same as diminishing those with said problem.
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https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n... [statcan.gc.ca]
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Where was this info a post ago when you were making nonsense claims of me diminishing the plight of those who are victims of crime?
Notice how I specifically pointed out I was talking about the US. Informing me that you wanted to talk about Canada would have been nice rather than going straight to character attacks.
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Actually my original post said North America.
Yes, then I pointed out that in the US at least such claims don't match statistics. This is when you had your opportunity to contribute constructively to the conversation by telling me that it was different in Canada. Instead you went to nonsensical character attacks.
Obviously I'm not American but as an outside observer I think crime is an election issue there too. You are certainly free to think all those voters are stupid, but I don't think that is working out well for you.
It is and this brings us to the "fear mongering" and "right wing myth" I mentioned early. Take a look at that Pew link I posted originally. Crime is way down but the public's perception of crime is way up. In the US crime is a fabricated polit
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In the US crime is a fabricated political issue, our crime rates are quite low by historic comparison and have been for quite some time.
You have more crime than we do, and it is a significant electoral issue here. People don't care about rates or trends. If there is too much crime then that is a problem, regardless of if there was more crime yesterday. As I mentioned, people care about absolute. You can always find somewhere/something/sometime better or worse and try to use it as an excuse. I'm pretty sure I've seen you criticize people for doing just that.
So instead of saying you know crime is down but still a problem, you say its
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So let me get this straight, you think it makes sense for a problem to become a big political issue in a country while at the same time said problem is at a dramatic low point for the country? So much so that the military should be sent into cities?
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So let me get this straight, you think it makes sense for a problem to become a big political issue in a country while at the same time said problem is at a dramatic low point for the country? So much so that the military should be sent into cities?
Well no, I think the military thing is ridiculous and straight up banana republic. But crime is still on my short list of voting issues here. Actually many countries have less crime than the US, so presumably anyone in any of those places that is concerned about crime is an idiot too. At least I am in good company.
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Maybe the perception of rampant crime is due to reported stories like this one (from Nov 15, 2023)?
https://cbs12.com/news/nation-... [cbs12.com]
"They got an arrest warrant for Green that contained even more charges than Dâ(TM)Antuono faces: 30 counts of robbery, burglary, firearms violations, and more."
Or this one from Sept 21, 2024:
https://ktla.com/news/local-ne... [ktla.com]
"Just hours after about 50 juveniles ransacked a 7-Eleven store in Pico-Robertson, another 7-Eleven was robbed at gunpoint in a different L.A. neighbor
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Yes, it's the furnishing of anecdotes as if they are the norm. Thanks for illustrating the problem.
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https://www.nationmaster.com/c... [nationmaster.com]
WWIII (Score:1, Troll)
Before that the police will collapse and you're going to have bandits. There are 400k cops in America. When the economy collapses you can bet there won't be money to keep 400k cops. Even if there was they can't protect you
Re:WWIII [or a fake story trying to scare people?] (Score:2)
This race to the bottom is going to result in 25 to 30% unemployment. Once you get to those numbers it's only a matter of time before wars start. The threat of nuclear annihilation can only do so much. Sooner or later a religious nut job will convince people that God will protect them.
Before that the police will collapse and you're going to have bandits. There are 400k cops in America. When the economy collapses you can bet there won't be money to keep 400k cops. Even if there was they can't protect you from 40 or 50 million people with nothing to lose.
Remember you have to kill every single one of them but they only have to kill you once.
That would be a good time to get over all the culture war bullshit we are obsessed with and figure out a solution to this problem.
So now I feel obliged to quote you against the censor trolls, though I don't even see what part of your comment ticked off the sock puppets. In particular, I don't see any basis for your magic estimate of 25-30% unemployment. Rather I think the super-rich super-greedy sociopaths calling the shots can't be satiated with all the income from 25-30% of the population. I don't even think they are concerned about relative wealth or how much of their money has become completely imaginary. But I think it's easier t
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You are indeed the troll here, not rsilvergun. You have a mental problem, please get help.
The 25 to 30% (Score:1)
Those are the current major targets for automation either directly using robotics or via llms and machine learning systems.
Taken as a whole it's a little more than a quarter of the working population.
There are plenty of other people who are currently facing automation like programmers and analysts and I don't want to minimize them because they tend to be higher income and ar
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Thanks for clarifying and I think I agree with most of the other stuff you wrote, though seems a bit of a waste to put so much effort into a long reply on an already effectively expired Slashdot discussion. Most of my concurrence should be apparent within my first paragraph below your quoted post. But should I congratulate you on having so many enemies that one had to stop by with a fresh brain fart? As if having the right sorts of enemies matters?
Then again, I mostly write on Slashdot to clarify my own thi
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Long before unemployment gets to 30% .. pariah groups will be identified and blamed. It depends on who is in power at the time of the unemployment increase what the pariah group will be. If it's democrats, the pariah group will be the "wealthy" .. if it's republicans .. the pariah group will be minorities. It all depends on whether the narrative is sold eloquently, with cherry-picked data and incidents.
Note .. the actual cause of the unemployment rate won't matter. It will only serve as a case to implement
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ICE actually has a ways to go. Some historical US deportations (and remember the population was smaller then):
1930s (Great Depression): A period of mass "repatriations" saw an estimated 1.8 million people of Mexican descent—including many U.S. citizens—rounded up and deported or pressured to leave voluntarily. These were often informal raids and not all were official deportations.
1954: Operation Wetback resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of individuals, though historians estimate
What a.... (Score:3, Interesting)
What a ridiculous expression of Japan's intolerance to letting foreigners in. Now instead of having immigrant shop workers who pay the variety of Japanese taxes that exist as well as spending their paycheck in country they're paying out for robots and sending paychecks out to off shored labor.
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Well at least they'll not have a MAGA and Trump in their future. Just look at all the damage they're doing under "illegal aliens". Japan it'll be "illegal robots" and they know how to handle those.
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Well at least they'll not have a MAGA and Trump in their future.
Not true https://www.reuters.com/busine... [reuters.com] . The type is alive and well in Japan and are the one's pushing for policy that results in the ridiculous need for human automated robots in shops amongst other things. They're just more polite about it.
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There are right-wing candidates in Japan, and they have been winning lately.
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Heaven forbid different ethnicities intermix. That's as crazy as using a normal font.
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I think he was going for Funny and the font was supposed to be a warning, but there is so much Poe's Law flying around now that I can't guess where he is or you are actually standing.
Which somehow reminds me of the new prime minister... Some (Japanese) people clearly hate her a lot, but I haven't seen any clear evidence of extremist tendencies. Color me ignorant, which explains my surprise to learn (in her TV biography today) that she must be fluent in English. Wikipedia says two years working for a moderat
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What a ridiculous expression of Japan's intolerance to letting foreigners in.
It's worse than that, they're intolerant even of mixed Japanese. They had a couple of big repatriation pushes a while back but a lot of those people left again when they found out they were discriminated against.
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is it because they are so much prettier than the locals?
Re:What a.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've always heard Asia in general has a pretty strict hierarchy of racial superiority. Generally it's North Asians first and and Filipinos last. I've heard about it from Asians from Asia but the most in depth description I ever got on it was from a white friend of mine who went to UC Berkely (which has a lot of foreign Asian students). Apparently there was a lot of talking down to the "lesser" Asian people by the ones higher up on the superiority list. Like a shocking amount of it and it was utterly routine
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Perhaps it is more complex.
Many years ago, while visiting Tokyo on business, I recall my Japanese colleagues explaining to me why so many preferred small purchases at vending machines vs. humans it boiled down to the avoidance of all the complex social nicieties of Japanese politeness. Importing workers involves not only training them in Japanese, but in the complex corner cases of manners and ultimately failing vs. dealing with a “robot” which evades all of that. And, I think the hope is that
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If they can't handle a foreign person behind the counter who doesn't quite get all their customs then that's part of their problem.
The robots are slow (Score:1)
From the video it looks like these robots work much slower than even a lazy human would. I guess it's better than nothing, since they have a shortage of workers. They must have a low unemployment rate?
There are weeaboos who will pay to do this. (Score:2)
I bet there are at least a few who will literally pay money to be a robot shelf stocker in a Japanese grocery store,
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I bet there are at least a few who will literally pay money to be a robot shelf stocker in a Japanese grocery store,
Let the gamifications begin!
Telepresence robots (Score:2)
I think it's a good idea, but they should have a display on their chest (not face, which is creepier) showing the operator and captioning/info.
If it's remotely operated (Score:2)
...it's a Waldo, not a Robot.
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I don't think so. Traditionally the term waldo has referred to equipment that allows you to manipulate objects in a place that the operator can't go to for whatever reason. Here, there's no physical reason that the operators couldn't go to Japan and do the work in person; the barrier is social, not physical. If what you wrote were right, drones would be called waldos, but they're not.
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Depends on WHERE in Japan, there are a few places that even Japanese people use waldos, if you remember.:-)
Slippery slope to turtles all the way down (Score:3)
Japanese Convenience Stores Are Hiring Robots Run By Workers in the Philippines
And when another place becomes even cheaper, they'll replace the humans in the Philippines with robots operated remotely. :-)
Robots in Japan <- robots in Philippines <- people elsewhere ...
Eventually, less work for humans will be excellent (Score:2)
Robots will eventually be excellent for all of us. Most things we buy will cost less.
Maybe we will have 4-day or 3-day work weeks.
Humans will not be doing extremely boring jobs.
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Robots will eventually be excellent for all of us.
No. Robots will eventually be excellent for those who remain. Most of us won't be here by then, and this is by design.
Robots will advance enormously in 10 years. (Score:2)
The speed of advancement is partly because AI reduces company expenses.
Who made this decision? (Score:2)
FamilyMart, Lawson and 7-11 are franchise chains in Japan.
Who made this decision to bring in the robots? Do the store-owner have a say in this or was it imposed on them?
I want the choice to buy from a store that is not involved in this or who has declined to have them.
If the robots' presence are a corporate decree, then I'd have to avoid all stores from the "big three".
That would leave Ministop, NewDays and Daily Yamasaki as unsullied.
Is this Tesla's goal? (Score:2)
Tesla has a robot that's not very capable on its own, but seemingly makes a good Waldo. Then, Musk supported a candidate promising to kick out as many immigrants as possible. Is Musk's goal to have them come back remotely?
Standardized layout (Score:2)
Nvidia blog post (2022) (Score:2)
There was a comment earlier wondering if the original article was real or made up. Here's a reference to the deployment of the remotely supervised stocking robots in a 2022 Nvidia blog post.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/... [nvidia.com]
"Tokyo-based startup Telexistence this week announced it will deploy NVIDIA AI-powered robots to restock shelves at hundreds of FamilyMart convenience stores in Japan.
There are 56,000 convenience stores in Japan â" the third-highest density worldwide. Around 16,000 of them are run b