Robot Demographics

From the original IEEE posting ("The Rise of the Machines"):

There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they’re the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10,000 manufacturing workers—a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).

I ran across this IEEE chart showing worldwide industrial robot population density over at Boing Boing. To me, what's surprising about this isn't Japan's preeminence in robotics--that's understood--but our totally weak showing (we're behind Belgium? Finland? We're barely ahead of Spain?).

Along with obvious fields like biotechnology and information technology, the 21st century will almost certainly be marked by an explosion of increasingly sophisticated consumer and industrial robots. Although the lower density surely reflects in some part our larger population, it's a little sad that we're letting control of yet another major industry slip away. Europe stole physics from us, space exploration may very well pass us by, and we may hamper our biotech dominance if we follow the yellow brick road to socialized medicine.

The good news? There is one industry where America is the acknowledged leader and will be for centuries to come. That industry is, of course, entertainment. And by entertainment, I mean porn. When we combine our insane domination of porn with our okay robotics industry, we will develop pornbots that will lead us directly back to global economic hegemony, and, eventually, to total control of the Earth. Unfortunately, we'll become willing slaves to the pornbots (well, the rest of you will--I'm already enslaved by the lovely and talented Mrs. Libertate), but at least they'll be American pornbots.

Pictured: Protype of the All-American Pornbot