An item from Japan, reported in the London Guardian, which relates World Population Day. As you likely know, Japan has a quite severe population problem—of the Boomster, not the Doomster variety. That is to say that the problem is not too many people but too few.

In particular, Japan has too few of the young, healthy, rugged kind of workers you need for big infrastructure projects, construction, and maintenance. Solution: robots.

Here’s a magnificent one. It doesn’t seem to have a name, but the pictures and description are impressive. Edited quote from the Guardian:

Starting this month, the large machine with enormous arms, a crude, disproportionately small Wall-E-like head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck—which can drive on rails—will be put to use for maintenance work on [West Japan Railways] network.

Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, ”seeing” through the robot’s eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely.

With a vertical reach of … 40ft, the machine can use various attachments for its arms to carry objects as heavy as … 88lb, hold a brush to paint or use a chainsaw.

"Japan introduces enormous humanoid robot to maintain train lines: The 12-metre high machine has coke bottle eyes and a crude Wall-E-like head, as well as large arms that can be fitted with blades or paint brushes" https://t.co/NsQNMH2ZkW pic.twitter.com/9uE4XJmylx

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) July 4, 2024

Use a chainsaw, huh? I have a big old tree that needs trimming in my back yard. When will Home Depot have this thing out for rental? Suburban homeowners want to know.