This article has been excerpted from The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel. For years, Japan has been the indisputable leader in robotics. If Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge is the cradle of humanity, Japan is the cradle of the humanoids, developing the first humanoid robot in the 1970s and many iterations since. Japanese roboticists pioneered the notion that artificial intelligence should be embodied. While the West focused more on algorithms in the abstract, Japanese institutions believed that AI innovation should be developed alongside--or rather, within--a physical artificial body. Japanese roboticists have been leading the way in realizing the aspiration to create robots that offer companionship to humans for decades.

"Be aware of how the balance of control is shifting" NB: This article was first published in 2012 and was copied here in 2020. For as long as humans have been inventing new technologies, we have tried to use these technologies to create automatons in our image. In other words, robots that we can talk to. Our oldest myths include robots made from clay. With the advent of metalworking, Hephaestus, blacksmith to the ancient greek gods, built handmaidens out of gold.

Skynet, Terminator or maybe Matrix these are the names that might come to our minds when we think of robots combined with artificial intelligence (AI). And what does these cults represent, fear! A threat that has been a common motif since Frankenstein and R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). The consequence of creating artificial life; or the impossibility of co-existence of people and artificial machines always seems to be a far-fetched dream. Meanwhile in Japan, the take is completely different.

By analyzing Tezuma's various works, the company wants to use Artificial Intelligence technology to answer the question of what kind of new manga …

A store themed around the work of "Astro Boy" manga artist Osamu Tezuka opened earlier this month in Tokyo's Asakusa district, putting an array of available products on display, from traditional Japanese crafts to artificial intelligence robots. The Tezuka Osamu Shop & Cafe is currently the only store, apart from the artist's memorial museum in western Hyogo Prefecture where he grew up, that sells character goods featuring his manga and anime, according to the shop's operator. With theme songs from his animation work playing in the background, the first floor displays approximately 300 types of merchandise, including wooden kokeshi (Japanese dolls) in the shape of characters including Astro Boy and his father figure Professor Ochanomizu, as well as ties featuring another masterpiece, "Phoenix," made in traditional Nishijin textiles. "Astro Boy" tells the stories of the adventures of a boy android with human emotions. The sci-fi manga series, serialized from 1952 to 1968 and also adapted into an animation series, has many fans in Asia and beyond.

PARIS – A rare series of sketches featuring "Astro Boy," the robot character created by late Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka, fetched a record 269,400 euros ($322,300) for works by the artist at an auction Saturday in Paris. Auction house Artcurial said the successful bid was nearly five times the estimated bid price of between 40,000 to 60,000 euros. Artcurial said it is very rare for the original drawings of Tezuka (1928-1989) to be auctioned, and that the successful bid was likely the largest ever for the cartoonist's work. The drawings comprise six panels of a page of a comic and depict Astro Boy's fight with an enemy. They were published in a manga magazine in Japan around 1956 or 1957.

PARIS – A rare series of sketches of Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka's robot character Astro Boy sold for a record €269,400 (¥35.1 million) at an auction in Paris Saturday. "It's a world record for this artist whose works are few in the market," said Eric Leroy, an expert on comic strips in the auction house Artcurial. The winning bid was five times the pre-sale estimate and Leroy put this down to "the rarity and exceptional character" of the China ink and water color strip, which measures 35 cm by 25 cm. It was drawn at the end of the 1950s and comprises six panels showing Astro Boy fighting an enemy. The buyer was a "European collector who had been dreaming for a long time" of buying the sketch, he said.

In one Toyota video, shown at the Tokyo Motor Show, a woman sits on a seaside cliff, talking about her father with her car. "He sounds like a great father," says Yui, in a baritone male voice. "You're a bit like him," the woman says. Until now, Toyota, the world's second-largest car maker by vehicle sales, has kept relatively quiet about autonomous vehicles and how it plans to deal with challenges from Silicon Valley upstarts, such as Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo LLC and others. "We think this is a good way to do it," said Didier Leroy, who oversees Toyota's business planning and operations.

Green-eyed and diminutive, Pepper works the crowd hard as he sings, dances and tries out his small talk. "You guys seem to be foreigners – where are you from?" he asks. When we tell him we're Irish, he says: "Gosh, Europe has so many interesting countries. I'd like to go there some day." Pepper is the latest in a long line of made-in-Japan battery-powered bipeds.

A withering factory town in the rust belt is looking for revival through a dose of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's "robot revolution." Kadoma's population in Osaka Prefecture has shrunk 13 percent as the nation ages, prompting mergers among elementary schools and emergency services departments. Factories can't find enough people to run assembly lines, further threatening an industrial base that includes titan Panasonic Corp. and smaller businesses like Izumo Co., a maker of industrial rubber. Yet Izumo President Tsutomu Otsubo doesn't believe the solution involves finding more people. He'd rather find more machines to do the work so his company can capitalize on Abe's plan to quadruple Japan's robotics sector into a ¥2.4 trillion ($20 billion) industry by 2020. "We want to create a mass-production system run by robots and tap into the global market," said Otsubo, in the prefabricated office that's tacked to the side of his aging factory.