Who Are They Kidding?

Who Are They Kidding?

I have seen these announcements from Japanese companies year after year. They still make no sense. Is there something in Japanese culture that makes people-shaped plastic-covered equipment of dubious function plausible as a substitute for real people? Do they think of one another as more-or-less robotic already, so that it's not a big step from their family members to a bumbling plastic thing?

My last working hypothesis was that the engineering groups who work on these things are really meant to provide sinecures for people who must be employed but would otherwise get in the way of real work. Then I met a Russian who was being recruited to work on Toyota's project. You don't recruit foreigners to sinecures -- do you? (Maybe you do if the sinecures are the management jobs!)

If you have a factual clue as to what these things are really about, please weigh in. I can speculate all by myself, but facts are dear. There's plenty to be explained, of course: why announcing these things impresses anybody; why companies choose this to impress people; how they delude themselves into thinking the projects (as such) matter; what good (if any) people have been able to extract from the resources wasted on them.