Re:Japan is embracing nursing-care robots
by lovemenot on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @09:22PM
(#16120994)
I don't understand why you excluded immigration as one of those choices.
In fact, nurses have been trickling in from Philippines and elsewhere. This program could be expanded considerably soon, as we have already seen with retail, construction and other sectors.
Re:Japan is embracing nursing-care robots
by sgdesign on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @08:44AM
(#16114830)
I've heard that too but I don't think it makes any kind of sense from a practical point of view, and I suspect it might just be a nice theory. These "nursing care robots" are very far from being able to do even 1/10th of what a normal human worker can.
In many Western countries, the answer to these problems has been immigration. However, Japan is famously insular; a prospective immigrant cannot hope to naturalize as a Japanese citizen they way one could in, say, Canada or Germany.
So Japan is otherwise stuck with three options: let the elderly wither and die with little care or dignity, commit a vast portion of Japan’s relatively scarce workforce to take care of its elders, or robots.
Japan picks robots.