Japan Already Makes Awesome Industrial Robots - Here's What Happens When It Looks...Elsewhere

Japan is one of the most robot-friendly countries in the world.

It already makes use of 250,000 robots across Japanese industry (more than any other country in the world) and expects this number to surpass 1 million by 2025, according to Time.

In a recent impressive display of robotics technology, Japanese robotics company KUKA pitted one of its robot arms against Timo Boll, ranked the eighth-greatest ping pong player in the world. The two faced off in a match with Boll ultimately winning. But the score is rather telling: while Boll won with 11 points, the robot still racked up an impressive 9 points against the human table tennis champion.

But when will robot "fashion" rise meet robot "function?" Science fiction and technology fans alike love to speculate over when robots will be indistinguishable from humanity - consider the Replicants of "Blade Runner" fame. Futurist Ray Kurzweil already predicts that robots will outsmart us in 15 years - how long until they "out-real" us as well?

It's a pretty tall order to make a realistic human face and body. Roboticists can get close, but they're not about to fool anyone, yet. As such, there's a shocking disparity between "expecting to register an object as a human" and "actually registering that object as a gross robot" called the "uncanny valley." As a robot becomes more human-like, it becomes more appealing. But once it gets "too human," it's repulsive (see the picture). If you push past that, to the point where the robot is indistinguishable from a real person, it becomes appealing again. We like things that look like us, but only if they completely succeed in doing so.

Japan's industrial robots and non-humanoid creations are already thriving - we'll meet some of them shortly. But we'll also take a look at the country's eerie robotic human analogs that foreshadow a future where it might not be so easy to tell them apart from "real" people.