Damn, I loved this book.

I picked this book after seeing it being mentioned on Twitter. And with me being deep into robotics, the impact of stats and data science and with me living in Japan, that it was clearly at the intersection of too many of my interests to let it pass.

And I really liked it.

To quote the author, the goal is to

draw attention not to a new species of Japanese, but to how robots are perceived and comprehended by Japanese – from politicians and roboticists to ordinary people of all walks of life.

It goes from representation of robots from the early age of automatas and the first representation of RUR to the latest projects and cul-de-sac. Interestingly enough, the book was finalised in 2018, a few weeks or months before several big projects would be shut down, including Asimo, one of Japan’s robot flagships.

The main element of the book is how the Japan robot industry and government tries to implement a society based on 1930-40s propaganda. Either on what the robots’ role is, how the society and its members interact with them and so on. It will surprise no one that one of the main benefit of introducing robots in the society for the japanese government is to “free woman from the burden of work” so they can just focus on producing babies and being devoted to the male members of their family cell (itself based on 1940s propaganda which has no relation to how the society is currently organised).

The book was also an agreable change from Your Life in Number. Where I was seeing the scaffolding around the words in that previous book, this one is extremely well written. Your Life in Number might represent my current way of writing but Jennifer Robertson’s book is what I aim to be able to write.

Final word

Go for it.

If you want to get a deep dive into the japanese robotics industry, see how robots are planned to interface with society as a whole and with our bodies in particular, this is the one for you.