If I recall my stats correctly, the US is #2 in robots, which isn't exactly bad. (Lagging Japan, as a result of 30 years of policy decisions. Japanese government/industry put their chips down on "robots win the future" many years ago and this was not a disastrously stupid decision.)
While I agree that the level of technology and packaging in Japanese robots in generally higher than U.S. counterparts, to take a rather cheap shot, it was U.S. drones and robots that were first on the scene.
Due to the pedigree of mobile robotics, the U.S. needed systems that worked now and not the future...resulting in a variety of heavy duty operable robots capable of working in difficult environments.
Here's arguably the most advanced robot in the world handling perfectly normal stairs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASoCJTYgYB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASoCJTYgYB0
Conclusion? Make the robot more like a crappy old American robot. http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2011/08/hondas-asimo-to-a...
It's critically important PR for the Japanese robotics industry to respond to Fukushima with something of utility. Otherwise these decades of work and millions of Yen in R&D haven't amounted to much more than an interesting series of public demonstrations.
Interesting you mentioned exoskeletons. The US is 5 to 10 years away of getting them on a battlefield. They're commercially available in Japan for medical use. (I'm not making a value judgement on that, except to the extent that "You could actually buy this" is superior to not being able to buy it.)
Actually that's a very good point, and a fascinating demonstration of the differences in commercial funding for a technology vs military funding and the similar but completely different kind of tech that comes out of that.
They had to turn to either a US or French robot to enter the reactor.
If Japan builds robots for the factory and the US builds robots for the battle field, it seem logical that US robots would be more useful in nuclear disaster. An power plant leaking hard radiation after a hydrogen explosion does resemble a battle field more than a factory floor, after all.
That aside, it's a fair point— lots of people are working on robots. But we should be building more robots. We shouldn't be talking about "how can we create American jobs," we should be talking about "how can we replace every American job with a robot."
What exactly is that a measure of?
Let's say that, as a middle-class American, I consume enough to employ ten manual laborers full-time. If we have ten robots for every person, then everyone can live like me and no one has to do the physical labor.
It would be a good conversation. I don't hear it starting. In fact, there was discussion of these issues in the 1960's and 1970's. By now, with the various crises on our heals, no one wants to consider the problems in this fashion.
Well, this is only one scenario of the things that can happen.
That's a big assumption there. More likely, companies will experience higher profit margins rather than pass along the entirety of the cost savings.
Real happiness seems to come from something like the Buddhist ideas of mindfulness and acceptance, and that's true whether you're a poverty-sworn monk, a janitor, a CEO, or a pot-smoking layabout.
The idea of "rewarding work" vs. "empty hedonism" is an arbitrary Western construct with little basis in reality.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/690806 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
That's not to say that working, alone, producing happiness is a correct idea, but it might make sense that accomplishment does. And these levels of accomplishment - cleaning the floor well for a janitor, for instance - can differ. Most people desire to "make a difference," another way of saying the same thing. If you're talking about deathbed wishes when looking back on a life, the more positive impact your life visited on others, the better.