The problem with the home is not that it was too hard. “We pick challenge tasks because they are hard. It goes unacknowledged for the duration of the demos, but the system will look familiar to anyone who has watched the team’s early concept videos. A quasi-humanoid robot hangs down, immobile and lifeless. To the side of both robots is a mock kitchen, with a gantry system configured to the top of its walls. As such, many Japanese roboticists have turned to robotics and automation to address issues like at-home healthcare, food preparation and even loneliness. That’s obviously the most sensationalistic of “solutions,” but it’s still an issue in search of meaningful solution. It’s the kind of thing that gets Yale assistant professors New York Times headlines for suggesting mass suicide. In a world where our health and wellness are so closely tied to our ability to work, it’s an issue bordering on crisis. Japan has the world’s highest proportion of citizens over the age of 65 - trailing only Monaco, a microstate in Western Europe with a population of fewer than 40,000. That’s driven, in no small part, by it choosing eldercare as a “north star” for the same reason that Japanese firms are so far ahead of the rest of the world in the category. TRI’s robotics team has long made the home a primary focus. Beyond the robotic vacuum, there’s been little in the way of breakthrough. Generations of roboticists have agreed that there are plenty of problems waiting to be automated, but thus far, successes have been limited. The lack of success in the category hasn’t been for lack of trying. In the case of TRI’s in-house robotics team, the impossible task is the home. The smartest people in the room can tell you a million times over why a specific issue hasn’t been solved, but it’s still easy to convince yourself that this time - with the right people and the right tools - things will just be different. But there’s also a grand, inevitable tradition of relearning mistakes. Oh, okay, maybe that was harder than we thought.”Īmbition is, of course, an important aspect of this work. Oh, we got machine learning and now you know we can do this. Everyone likes a happy ending.“I think I’m probably just as guilty as everybody else,” Toyota Research Institute’s (TRI) senior vice president of robotics, Max Bajracharya, admits. And hey, if you end up finding a job through this post, let me know on Twitter. But if you were recently laid off, are a recent graduate or are just looking for a change, this will hopefully be a good place to start. This isn’t a listing of all available roles in robotics. This morning, however, I put out a call in hopes of getting enough together for a standalone post. I’ve been featuring a handful of companies that are hiring in my weekly robotics newsletter, Actuator. Simply put: It’s a bad time to be looking for jobs, but a good time to be looking for jobs in robotics. Certainly, labor issues aren’t going away any time soon, nor is the drive to increasingly automate fields like fulfillment, construction, healthcare and agriculture, among others. If anything, a lot of this bad news will only serve to bolster the industry. It’s also true that we’re going to see more companies get acquired or wind down.īut a lot of money was infused into automation, providing runways that will help many get out on the other side in one piece. It’s true that some big companies (Alphabet, Amazon) have slowed robotics investments. As an industry, robotics is somewhat uniquely positioned here, given the growth it saw during the pandemic. Now some good news: Companies are hiring. It can be easy to lose sight of the human toll of mass layoffs when we see numbers in the tens of thousands among tech giants. It’s also the foundation of many of our closest relationships. It’s not healthy, necessarily, but it’s the thing we spend most of our time doing. We invest so much of our identity in what we do. Here in the U.S., your occupation is invariably the second thing people ask you about after getting your name. You can also know these things to be implicitly true and still struggle with questions of self-worth. A million strangers on LinkedIn can tell you how great you are and how none of this is any of your fault. I work in publishing and am well aware of the pain of being laid off - I’ve been through the process twice. One of the nice things about having a platform like TechCrunch is the opportunity to help people in that difficult position. Besides, if you’re unable to find work, positive macroeconomic trends are cold comfort. The economy is a bit better - kind of, maybe, sort of? While things appear to be trending in the right direction, it’s going to be a long road.
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