Mao’s Robots
This is episode 10 of The French Tech Comedy by DNA cowgirl.
Episode 1: The Science of Sakura
Episode 2: Lost in Telomere Translation
Episode 3: Feel Flee to Donate
Episode 4: Pasteurising Tech With the French Touch
Episode 5: The Newborn Symphony Project
Episode 6: The Unknown 9% of the Human Genome
Episode 7: The Apple Tech Specs Conference
Episode 8: religA.I.on
Episode 9: Hiroshima is Japan’s World Trade Center
Yuki was now reading the updates by Thomas on Facebook with great interest. He was explaining the world in a way that she found both very simple and unheard of.
“We all know why the Japanese government is willing to robotise the industry. The active population is dropping, the senior population is on the rise. Same problem in Germany. But why would China want to do the same? The answer is simple. Before 2050, the Chinese population will experience just the same problems as in Germany or Japan today. Anticipating this fact, Beijing authorities are heavily relying on robotics for the future of their industry, knowing that there will be no employees to do the job in 2050. In China, the transition to the one-child policy was dictated by the government, with brutal social consequences. The one-child policy was introduced in 1979 by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to curb China’s rapidly growing population. Now, just do the maths. 1979 + 65 = 2046. So the problems will start in China in 2046. Too many old retired people, and too few young people to sustain them. Now as China faces an ageing and shrinking population rather than an exploding one, the government has decided to end the controversial policy. But even if the one-child policy was abolished by the government a couple of years ago, it is still very expensive for middle-class citizens to have more than one child. By the way, Deng Xiaoping was only pursuing Mao Zedong’s demography policy after his death in September 1976. So arguably, the robotisation that is happening now in China, anticipating the brutal shrinking of the active population in 2046, stems from Mao in the first place, even if, technically, it was implemented by Deng.
Now what’s happening in France, compared to Germany or Japan? France is boasting about the strong demography, lots of babies. In reality, we don’t invest much in educating our youth. We just have too many young people, we don’t know what to do with them. Sure, we do have day care centres for them. We send them to college, where they can get a degree in Fine Arts. It doesn’t cost much money to open up a department of fine arts in a college. You just need space (lecture halls), a few underpaid teachers, pens and writing pads. Science would cost much more money. Laboratory benching and equipment for each student would be way too costly. Faced with an ever growing number of students, policy makers and university leaders decided they could budget Fine Arts for everyone; science for the happy few. But no worries, like I’ve said, we’ve got too many young people. Now look at what’s happening in Germany and Japan, where youth is a scarce resource, and as such, they have to take great care of it. Educate it properly. Give it access to the best opportunities for the future. Instead, plethoric youth in France will get to study fine arts and register as job seekers. When we have few children to feed and the price of housing remains stable, it is easier to bear a prolonged wage austerity. In the 2000s, France was one of the European countries with the least increase in wage costs, but increased slightly more than in Germany. In short, our demographic dynamism has contributed for now to negatively impacting our economy. This may be different in the future, if France is able to properly educate its many young people and find work, which is far from being the case at present. Also, don’t forget that when factories grew exponentially in the emerging countries, and mainly in China, German machines were installed there; not French equipment (where is the French industry??). Germany is an inspiring model because of its decentralised organisation, which gives it a much more balanced territory than France, its successful integration of young people into the labor market through apprenticeship, the important power granted to employees in companies through co-management, the voluntarism in the energy transition.”
Yuki thanked Thomas for his instructive updates on Facebook. It seemed like Thomas was giving guided tours of the world on Facebook. She still wasn’t sure why he had come to Japan to see how local startups where doing in the digital economy — bitcoin and the blockchain — but she wanted to ask him for advice about her new project: getting her own genome sequenced. She was a bit afraid of 23andMe. Would her private data be owned by Google? Was it a good thing, or a bad thing? She had learned that 23andMe was an early spinoff from Google…
It turned out Thomas was writing updates on the worldwide biotech sector, in French and on a regular basis, with focus on the precision medicine revolution and direct to consumer genetics market. He was also giving lots of updates about the CRISPR research, where Yuki learned quite a few stunning things. She decided she would organise an informal meeting between Taka and Thomas. The first question Thomas asked was quite surprising.
“ — Why are fruit and veggies so expensive in Japan?” Yuki had arranged for them to meet during a typical dinner in Hiroshima, as Thomas wanted to try some local specialty food: Okonomiyaki, the Japanese pancake. Or at least, a crepe-like dish containing meat, seafood, cabbage, spaghetti or udon-style noodle, and to top it all, something Yuki didn’t enjoy too much: a mishmash of soy-sauce and ketchup and US-style barbecue sauce… In a nutshell, Yuki’s and Thomas food preferences were worlds apart. Blame it on the epigenetics or the microbiome, or a combination of both?
“ — People here prefer perfectly shaped fruit and vegetables, even if this means using a greater amount of pesticide. They don’t want to know how it is done, they just want it to be perfect. Perfectly sized and shaped red apples…”
Thomas interrupted. “ — In Asia, there are plenty of one-child families. People might want to use CRISPR to avoid having a sick kid (they can’t afford their only child to be sick), plus I guess the religious crap like God wanted my kid to be sick is total bullshit here, right?”
“ — …”
Taka was confused. What did this have to do with expensive fruit and vegetables? Which religion was he mentioning here? Yuki tried to translate for her brother.
“ — He is just shifting from one topic to another. It means you answered his question, so he’s just moving on to the next thing on his mind. And I believe he is mentioning catholic religion in the US. There are larger families there, and people seem to be very religious. If their kid is sick, then it means maybe God wanted it this way? Their way to deal with it is to build a larger family. Also, what he means is people would probably react in a different way in Asia, where catholic religion is less common and families are smaller.”
“ — …”
Taka was lost in translation. He was alternatively looking at his sister and Thomas, puzzled. The famous French blogger laughed.
“ — As far as I know, she’s the best expert in intercultural and transcultural relationships in Japan. We feel so lucky to be able to explore Japan with your help, Yuki.”
“ — Arigatou gozaimasu.”
A few seconds later, Thomas was talking about the direct to consumer genetics market worldwide.
“ — Do you know Veritas Genetics?”, he asked.
“ — No,” answered Taka.
Thomas delivered a long monolog:
“ — How do we transition to the future of medicine, where I am able to browse my genomic and medical data on my iPhone, share — sell — some of it? Where are the patient-centric tools for patients to collect, share and monetise their medical, genomics, lifestyle, IoT data with academics and pharmaceutical industry? is there even an app for that? Matching your genotype with your phenotype is what will make Precision Medicine happen. Phenotype is your medical, lifestyle data. What you are eating and drinking, your activity, sleep quality, your outcome if you are a patient, your response to drugs (side effects, metabolism). Connected devices can provide us with that kind of data, as well as spirometry, air quality, cardiac rhythm, how you behave when driving, your emotions, etc. Genotype is all the things that can be done with your DNA and microbiome: sequencing, analysing the variants, coding and non-coding regions — the very young science of epigenetics — , establishing your ancestry, gaining a better insight into your medical profile, using your microbiome to fight some kind of antibiotic-resistant infection…”
“ — Can Veritas Genetics do that?”, asked Yuki.
“ — They seem to have a competitive edge in the market,” answered Thomas.
She decided she would have a look at their offer. Maybe this was the right time and the right company to have her genome sequenced?
