Japan’s birth rate has been low since 1975, when it dipped below replacement (the average woman stopped having at least two kids). That has led to an ever-growing proportion of Japan’s population being elderly, with fewer and fewer young people around to care for them. In 2023, the average Japanese woman was expected to have only 1.2 children over the course of her lifetime, down from 1.26 kids in 2022.
How, then, will Japan manage to care for its elderly? Perhaps robots will solve the problem.
“With around a third of its population over the age of 65, Japan is increasingly turning to robots to care for its elderly citizens. New research suggests that this isn’t as dystopian as it sounds. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which surveyed robot adoption in Japanese nursing homes, found that the machines are associated with improvements in both the quality and productivity of elder care,” says the Cato Institute. Robots improve care in the nursing homes, and also improve the productivity of the humans working in them. As the study’s abstract explains,
How do employment, tasks, and productivity change with robot adoption? Unlike manufacturing, little is known about these issues in the service sector, where robot adoption is expanding. As a first step towards filling this gap, we study Japanese nursing homes using original facility-level panel data that includes the different robots used and the tasks performed. We find that robot adoption is accompanied by an increase in employment and retention and the relationship is strongest for non-regular care workers and monitoring robots. The share of specific tasks performed by robots increases with the adoption of the respective type of robot, leading to reallocation of care worker effort to “human touch” tasks that support quality care. Robots are associated with improved quality (reduction in restraint use and pressure ulcers) and productivity.
Other countries may need to use robots, too. Japan’s birth rate used to be among the world’s lowest, but by 2022, many nations had lower birth rates than Japan, or similarly-low birth rates. In 2023, the average Canadian woman was expected to have only 1.26 children, almost as low as Japan’s 1.20 children per woman.
South Korea’s birth rate has plunged to a shockingly-low level, with the average woman expected to have only 0.72 children in her lifetime, as of 2022. In Taiwan, the average woman is expected to have only 0.87 children in her lifetime. So countries like South Korea and Taiwan will have shrinking, rapidly-aging populations, with ever fewer young people to tend the elderly than Japan a generation from now.
In China, the average woman is expected to have only 1.18 children in her lifetime, resulting in China’s population rapidly shrinking in the second half of the 21st century. Rates are almost as low in much of Europe: 1.24 kids per woman in Italy, 1.16 kids per woman in Spain, and 1.46 kids per woman in Germany, as of 2022. All these birth rates are expected to fall further as the 21st century progresses.
Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms. On some American farms, there are drones with artificial intelligence, and robots that use artificial intelligence to kill 100,000 weeds per hour. Scientists have developed tiny robots to repair damaged cells, and nanorobots to destroy cancerous tumors.
Robots are replacing some fast-food workers after California increased the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 per hour, which many franchises just can’t afford. Thousands of fast-food workers lost their jobs due to the minimum wage hike.
German robots are hunting the North Sea for tens of thousands of unexploded World War II bombs.
Last year, doctors used a surgical robot to carry out incredibly complicated spinal surgery.
