Cool eh? I think the Japanese have a culture for this stuff. It reminds me off about 30 years ago I visited a Toyota engine making plant in Nagoya and it was unremarkable apart from there being almost no people on the line. Just engine parts trundling from one machine to another on automated conveyers. I don't think there was much computer control - it was pretty much mechanical mechanisms.
Japan is very much a land of contrasts. You have things like this and their precision manufacturing. And then you enter an office and you're caught in a whirlwind of paper and faxes. And don't get me started on their banking. ATMS with opening hours...
Or the guys with umbrellas making sure you don't get splashed by the guy washing the window once story up. Or the guy with a glow-stick warding you away from walking into an already signed road/pavement repair.
It's odd - we don't even need robots for these jobs, they are simply pointless. Perhaps they are made possible by large-scale underemployment due to automation in other areas.
Not exactly what you're talking about but still relevant:
"Not surprisingly, many corporate executives oppose extending employment protections to 65. Komatsu, the world’s second-biggest construction equipment maker, rehires 90 percent of its retirees with a 40 percent pay cut. 'I’m happy to keep workers on after 65, but I don’t think many are physically capable,' says Chief Executive Officer Kunio Noji, who is 65. Yasuchika Hasegawa, the CEO of Asia’s preeminent drugmaker, Takeda Pharmaceutical, and chairman of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, says employers shouldn’t be forced by law to retain older workers. He is 66."
I renewed a mortgage recently. I was told: you don't have to come in to sign anything. Just print the PDF's that we will send you, scan them, sign and e-mail them back.
That is basically faxing --- only significantly less convenient.
I prefer this method any day. Most people in the younger generations don't have a house phone line, much less a fax machine. It's so annoying to me when I have to send something to a company and the only method they accept is a fax. Luckily that has changed quite a bit in the past few years.
Do you know the reason for that? It takes more effort to program a machine to turn off during certain hours than it does to just let it run 24/7, so someone must have thought there was a compelling reason to disallow it. Maybe to prevent drunk people from overdrawing their account on horrible purchases?
Maybe to stop a rush on cash deposits in the case of a banking scare out of hours? ie. rumour / announcement that the bank has run out of money. Seems unlikely.
More likely is that it's to save money - if there is a cost incurred in supplying money for other banks or keeping the machine filled with cash, perhaps reducing hours is simply a cost saving measure.
I imagine a manual step somewhere along the way - not at the level of individual withdrawals and deposits, of course, so it scales well enough - but still someone has to be in the office until that ATM is closed.
