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The
DailyDispatches

I, robot: Japan’s cyborg society

I, robot: Japan’s cyborg
society

The Japanese government believes robots and humans can live happily side
by side. Our correspondent steps into the shoes of an “immigrant from
the future”

the future”

Simon
Cox | July 12th 2016

Japan is famously wary of immigration, fearing that foreign workers will
undermine job security and upset familiar ways of life. But there is one kind of
industrious interloper that is greeted more enthusiastically in Japan than in
any other country. Robots or “immigrants
from the future”, as my colleague Oliver Morton calls them, are unusually
well assimilated into Japanese society.

Japan’s obsession with robots is well documented. In fact it’s a cliché.
Foreign journalists seem to like Japan’s affection for robots almost as much as
Japan likes robots. If I were a seasoned Tokyo correspondent, rather than an
occasional visitor, I would probably try to resist revisiting that well. But I’m
not, so I can’t.

Japan is home to more robots than any other country. Adverts for Fanuc, which
has been automating factories for 60 years, adorn the baggage trolleys at
Tokyo’s Haneda airport, where the carpets are sometimes scrubbed by an
autonomous cleaning machine capable of riding lifts by itself. Visitors to the
Mitsukoshi department store were last year greeted by a cordial humanoid in a
kimono, with a demure smile straight from the uncanny valley of
verisimilitude.

In a Softbank branch, I once shook hands with Pepper, a winsome robot
companion that is supposed to read emotions and respond accordingly. (From what
I could gather, its level of response was authentically human, if that human
were a giggly teenage narcissist.) Just as London tried to make the 2012
Olympics as inclusive as possible, Tokyo, which hosts the games in 2020, is
proposing a Robot Olympics to make sure the automata are not left out.

Read the government’s 91-page robot strategy and the immigration analogy
seems quite apt. The document talks of building a “robot barrier-free society”
in which humans and robots can “coexist and co-operate on a daily basis”. It
envisages robots teaching foreign languages, weeding fields, preparing
lunchboxes and shouldering the kind of “harsh, dangerous, and repetitive labour”
that we humans, the natives of the present, try to avoid.

Other countries may fear the robot revolution, but Japan’s government is
proudly dedicated to it. It has appointed an expert panel called the Robot
Revolution Realisation Council. One prominent member is Professor Yoshiyuki
Sankai, the brilliant head of a robotics firm in Tsukuba. His company,
Cyberdyne, just happens to share a name with the world-destroying technology
firm in the “Terminator” films. Its flagship product is an exo-skeleton (a
wearable machine that gives you super-human strength) called HAL,
which stands for “hybrid-assistive limb”. If the acronym sounds familiar, that’s
because it’s shared by the renegade spaceship computer in “2001: A Space
Odyssey”. This is clearly not a company that feels under any pressure to tiptoe
around technophobes.

Last month, Cyberdyne allowed me to try on an exo-skeleton for the lower
body. After choosing a unit suitable for my weight, height and shoe size, they
strapped and screwed me in to a white harness, connected to a pair of leg braces
and snugly fitting shoes. They also fastened 18 electrodes to my knees, thighs
and glutes. (By this point, my instructor tells me, people usually get excited
and start humming the “Terminator” theme.)

The 18 sensors can read the bio-electrical patterns that arise on the skin
when the brain tells a muscle to flex. By following these signals, the
exo-skeleton can respond to the wearer’s intentions not merely his motions. Many
people who have lost full use of their legs can nonetheless move Cyberdyne’s
bionic limbs with their mind. HAL has therefore proved helpful in
treating victims of strokes, spinal-cord injuries and polio. By moving the
wearer’s leg when he tells it to, the robot suit provides feedback to the brain,
helping in some cases to repair damaged neural circuits. Two elderly customers
equipped with a legsuit and a zimmer frame were circling the studio when I
visited.

Baby steps for a beginner cyborg

Once strapped in and wired up, I too was put through my paces. I practised
standing, climbing a small staircase, and marching on a treadmill. Some of this
was harder than it sounds for a beginner cyborg: “If you are hesitant, the robot
senses it, so relax,” I was told.

I tried to lean forward on my toes, as if ready for the revolution. But I was
advised to lean back with my chest out, allowing my weight to fall on my heels.
The result was a heavy-footed clump, clump, clump, satisfyingly reminiscent of
RoboCop. The sci-fi was dialled up further when my instructor set the limbs on
auto-pilot, taking me through a preprogrammed set of motions (such as walking)
without much help from me. The sensation is rather like pedalling downhill on a
fixed-wheel bicycle.

What difference does HAL make to a healthy person? The
full-body suit apparently allows ordinary people to walk with loads of up to
80kg. My leg-suit experience was not nearly as superheroic. The instructor
limited the “torque” to 40%, which, as I understand it, made me at most 1.4
times the man I usually am. This was not enough to leap buildings in a single
bound or even to kick a football like Charles
“Dead Shot” Keen. The effect was more Tin Man than Iron Man. The bionic
reinforcement was however enough to make me forget the suit’s additional weight,
as well as the 2.5kg they strapped to my left ankle to simulate a
disability.

Indeed, the only part of the experience that warranted any dread or phobia
was the disrobing, when I had to rip the sticky electrodes off my thighs,
stripping small clumps of hair off with them. Our cyborg future may be
friendlier than Westerners fear, if not always as harmonious as the Japanese
imagine. However it turns out, it will be worth shaving your legs
for.

Simon
Coxwrites about emerging economies for The Economist and
is based in Hong Kong

Keywords: ROBOTS, robotics,
Japan, technology,
artificial
intelligence

ILLUSTRATION  MICHEL
STREICH

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