Hi folks, welcome to This Is Robotics for February 2024, Episode #28. I’m Tom Green, your host and companion as we travel together through the big, wide world of modern robotics…and now, robotics is getting even better as it converges with artificial intelligence. Ah, the age of smart robots is upon us. Thanks again for making This Is Robotics the #1 robotics news podcast worldwide…for two years running.  We did some investigative journalism this month to find out why…and we were surprised at what we found. You will be as well. An article series on the topic we published in Asian Robotics Review titled Why So Little Robot Automation in America? got over 10,000 hits. Our email response from our readership attested to the fact that we were not the only ones surprised by our findings. It’s accompanied by a news report from CBS which also covered the strange state of robotics in the U.S. Then we’ll dip off into What’s New in Robotics? What’s New in Robotics? is the blog we write in partnership with Robotiq.  From the blog, we present here at This Is Robotics three FIRST-EVERS in robotics. We love what people have been doing with robots and cobots lately.  Simply amazing! Two of them hail from Korea: Hyundai’s micro-factory in Singapore; and a huge breakthrough by Koreans in teaching robots to respond to the human voice. Then we nip over to Argonne Laboratories to see cobots in a first-ever making medical radioisotopes.  We close out the podcast with what is the biggest story in robotics for the foreseeable future: Can Robots Save East Asia? China, Korea, & Japan are suffering from a new pandemic: Too Few Workers, Too Many Elderly, and Too Little Automation. China, Korea, and Japan are plagued with the very same “too few, too many, and too little” affliction simultaneously. The clock is ticking on China, Korea, and Japan. The five years 2025 to 2030 will be critical. Each country has a plan. What is each doing…and can each plan work? We have been following this mega-story since 2023. Along with an in-depth article series on the subject in Asian Robotics Review, we brought the story into this month’s podcast as well. We’ll show you what we know.  As always, look in the show notes for all the links to the online articles.  Thanks for coming. We appreciate your attention and loyalty.