neptunespear

Hey man. In case you see this, you might consider contacting Go Public (CBC News) about this: [email protected]

In addition, the Law Society of BC offers half-hourly consultations for $25, it's called the Lawyer Referral Service.

This would be true if Japanese companies were eager to embrace the open software revolution. However, even as companies in the U.S. and Europe democratize AI, Japanese companies have stubbornly plodded along with closed-off, proprietary standards just like in the 70s and 80s. Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sony, KDDI, and so on. There needs to be a cultural shift.

I never said that Preferred/Mujin/LeapMind would be the future of automation. I just said that in my uneducated opinion, having followed these companies for some time now, I feel like they may be better equipped to handle "new economy" automation--shift from hardware to software, shift from closed-off proprietary standards to open collaboration. Aka the anathema of Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, KDDI, etc.

The provincial government in my home province of British Columbia, Canada, is developing a genuine progress indicator (GPI) to replace the GDP metric, which was the idea of the BC Green Party. The point made here is that GDP is a very imperfect solution. Christy Clark may have boasted about BC's booming economy by pointing to GDP numbers, but do they explain the whole story?

I know that's neither here nor there, however.

That was a big typo since I meant to finish that sentence. I've fixed it now.

> I've worked closely with one of these companies... Perhaps they were just not suited to the project we were working on, but I found them quite dis-organized, lacking in focus and mostly buzzwords and fakery. Kind of sad.

You can't just drop an anecdote like that without naming and shaming.

> Who's open-sourced their driverless car tech - anyone with wheels on the ground and a car you can buy? Some advanced mechatronics will be required to fill a lot of voids in the manual labour space. Whose battery tech and engineering prowess will we be using in these vehicles and machines?

Ah, but that's on the hardware side. Japan is excellent at hardware, its education system spits out lots of factory workers. But I have a hunch that AI and automation, in the future, will emphasizing hardware a bit less (since China/Taiwan/Korea has gotten so good at efficient manufacturing), and refocus towards software--that may be where the growth will be. Since you mentioned Tesla Motors, I will note that they hire a lot of software engineers, and it's not a 100% proprietary locked-down atmosphere on the software side; open source collaboration is encouraged. Tesla even open sourced some of their patents, though I will admit I think Elon Musk's attitude towards open source software can be a bit duplicitous.

> That should be praise, no? I mean, aspects of sexism and odd views about social hierarchy can go in the trash, but their productivity is still very good.

Haha...accidentally several words there. I've fixed it.

Automation has changed from when Japan was on top. The focus is now on software and open collaboration in a globalized society, not hardware built by factory workers with proprietary standards (looking at you, FeliCa)

China may surpass Japan in the automation/AI sphere. Lots of young, English-speaking, western-educated workers, plus the PRC has already innovated so much in manufacturing, shipbuilding, etc., and an ecosystem willing to splash cash on daring startups (albeit a lot of that is state funding, and you need CCP connections to come up in the Chinese startup world) in ways that leave Japan in the dust. Look at how Nvidia is working in China, look at the rise of Aliyun, Baidu Cloud and Tencent Cloud.

The only Japanese companies I know that are geared for automation for the new economy are companies like Mujin, LeapMind and Preferred Networks.

As a side note, the fact that Japan has managed zero-growth despite a rapidly shrinking, aging population; almost zero immigration; and roughly the same economic policy as from the 1980, is nothing short of a Herculean endeavor. I wonder what Japan is going to do when the population decline really gets in gear around 2040.

I did some digging in the /r/uwaterloo subreddit and it turns out that some customers were getting packages at no cost. Perhaps it wasn't financially viable.

On the microscopic chance that Jeff Bezos sees this: mellow out, man! There was an anecdote, I can't remember from where, maybe from the "Faces of Amazon" page, related to Jeff's response to the NYT criticism back in 2015. Jeff's response was, "should that happen to you, escalate to HR or email me directly". Someone did exactly that and got fired for it.

Protip: Listen to this guy. He's Milun Tesovic, the Expa Labs co-founder and SFU Beedie alumuns.

While I have your ear, Milun, I was curious why Expa didn't open in K-W or Montreal first. They're much closer to east coast tech hubs.