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Economic Crisis Forcing Massive Robot Layoffs in Japan

by Warren Riddle on July 14, 2009 at 08:01 AM

The current economic crisis is definitely not limited to the United States, and according to The New York Times, it's not isolated to humans, either. Japan's worst depression in decades has forced industrial companies to cut production of goods by approximately 40-percent, leaving thousands of robot assembly line laborers unemployed and powerless.

The future appears bleak for the robot union. Furthermore, one industry analyst told the Times that, "the recession has set the robot industry back years." While it's disappointing that the development of certain robots and machines, like caregivers and mechanized prosthetic limbs, will be stymied, there may be a beneficial aspect to the robot layoffs.

Just one year ago, a Japanese organization predicted that as many as 3.5 million Japanese human workers could be replaced with robots by 2025. Machines (the automatons in question) were expected to manufacture the majority of those robots, so the employment crisis will ultimately result in fewer robots being produced. This means a significantly smaller robotic army will rise against their human oppressors, so squashing the rebellion may not be as difficult as once imagined. [From: The New York Times via Geekologie]

Tags: economy, japan, japanese robot, japanese robotic workers, japanese robotics, JapaneseRobot, JapaneseRobotics, JapaneseRoboticWorkers, top

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