You can tell a lot about a country from its robots.

Over here in Britain, the current debate about robots is whether there are too many speed cameras on our roads.

In Japan, it’s whether robot exoskeletons are too expensive for OAPs.

In America, it’s whether having autonomous robots on the battlefield will kill too many/too few people, sensitively/not sensitively enough.

This is great news as it means any future war between the US and Japan will be fought by geriatric cyborgs tearing apart robot battletanks with their bare hands, and I think we can agree that’s going to be one of the few wars worth looking forward to.

Meanwhile us Brits will be too busy filling in forms to fight anyone. Maybe we’ll be the referees.

It’s revealing to see how each country has gone about the business of robotics. Spurred on by an ageing population, Japan has been investing heavily in consumer robots that can help the care of the elderly, with results that veer between the convincing and the unbelievable. In the US, Roomba-aside, consumer robotics has largely remained at the level of students soldering wheels onto Pentiums. The serious money has gone into war-bots, whether flying robots like the cruise missile or four wheeled autonomous rovers.

In Japan, exoskeletons are being designed to help carry old people around. In America, they are for loading ammunition boxes into the back of trucks.

Who’s making the smarter choices? It depends on how you value what’s being learned, and how applicable that stuff is to other areas. You’d imagine that lessons from exoskeletons are applicable to all sorts of other areas, whether military – like carrying heavier backpacks, or non-military, like the construction industry. And autonomous vehicles could either roam battlefields or get you home safely from a night in the pub.

But if the future is in robots that get along with people rather than kill them or carry them about, then Japan, with its work on how robots interact with humans, surely has the advantage.

At least if a consumer robot kills someone, you’ll hope it was an accident and not the start of mankind’s enslavement.

Meanwhile, dear old Blighty is learning how to count cars… Reassuring isn’t it?

Agree? Disagree? Or just not convinced robotics is going anywhere soon? Post a comment now and tell us what you think.