(Bloomberg) -- Japan is the world’s biggest industrial robot manufacturer, but its relationship with robotics extends far beyond mechanical and technological prowess. Japanese culture, perhaps more than any other, has embraced the seemingly inescapable future in which humans and robots work hand-in-mechanical hand.
On this episode of the Bloomberg Originals series Momentum, Haslinda Amin explores how across construction, manufacturing, agriculture and even hospitality, robots are being incorporated into everyday Japanese life to both address long-term societal issues and improve current living conditions. The upswing in innovation is part of a broader technological resurgence in a country that introduced the world to the electronic age.
The ascendance of robots and more broadly artificial intelligence necessarily evokes the threats of redundancy and job elimination. But Japanese entrepreneurs and innovators take great pains to say the overall benefit of such technology will be to improve and eventually transform the lives of humans.
On this episode, Amin visits a company that’s been using robots to automate aspects of agriculture, making food production more seamless and efficient. In the construction sector, robotics has become integral to making up for Japan’s labor shortage, itself inexorably tied to an aging population. With several million fewer construction workers as compared with a few decades ago, the development of smart construction machines has become critical to Japan’s continued development.
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