In Japan, work is now a VR game and you don’t get a respawn

Japan, the country that brought us bullet trains, vending machines selling everything from ties to tentacles, and now apparently a plan to solve its labour crisis without inviting anyone to actually come over, has done it again. Its latest stroke of genius is a project by Telexistence, which uses robots in FamilyMart and 7-Eleven stores across Tokyo. The twist? The robots are operated remotely by workers in Manila through VR headsets. It’s called telemigration, a word that makes “outsourcing” sound almost quaint, and it’s being hailed as the future of labour. Essentially, Japan gets to keep its doors locked while still importing cheap labour, and the Philippines gets to export its citizens without the airfare.

Each of these TX robots, affectionately known as TX SCARA or TX Ghost because apparently even the names have to sound like dystopian anime villains, restocks shelves about 98 per cent of the time without human help. The remaining 2 per cent is when someone in Manila straps on a headset and fixes whatever the AI got wrong. So for now, humans still have a job, as the janitors of machine imperfection. The system runs on NVIDIA Jetson chips and streams over an ultra-low-latency 5G connection so tight it makes most home broadband look medieval. The target is 20 milliseconds of lag; anything more and the operator starts getting “VR sickness”, which is the polite term for wanting to throw up because you’re restocking virtual Pocari Sweat in real time from 1,800 miles away.

The economics are exactly what you’d expect when accountants discover teleportation. A local Japanese worker earns roughly $1,800 a month; a Filipino teleoperator earns $300. That six-to-eight-fold difference keeps Tokyo’s retail sector running while creating what officials call “virtual remittances.” The Philippines calls it a boon to the BPO industry. Critics call it 21st-century wage compression with better Wi-Fi. Either way, the money flows north to Japan’s servers and south to Manila’s banks, while the human operators quietly train their own replacements. Every correction they make feeds Telexistence’s AI brain, known as GORDON (because naming your robotic overlord after a middle manager seems apt), teaching it how to make fewer mistakes next time. It’s a bit like digging your own grave while applauding the efficiency of the shovel.

The ethical paradox is deliciously bleak. Japan solves its labour shortage without touching its immigration laws. The Philippines creates digital jobs that don’t require families to be split by oceans. And somewhere in between, a Filipino operator earning $1.50 an hour is feeding data to a machine that will soon make him obsolete. This isn’t so much “brain drain” as “brain upload.” When the AI hits 99.99 per cent accuracy, the operators will be fired by the robots they trained, politely, of course, probably with a pop-up saying thank you for your service.

Naturally, no one knows who’s legally responsible when one of these metallic ghosts drops a crate of canned coffee on someone’s foot. Is it the Japanese store manager? The Filipino operator? Or the engineers at Telexistence who coded the robot’s drunken grip? Current law is as unprepared for this as it was for tide pods and deepfakes. There’s also the question of data, endless streams of video feeds and personal metrics flying across borders that privacy regulators still treat like radioactive material. It’s as if we’ve built a global factory with no idea who owns the floor.

And here’s the kicker, once this model scales, local workers lose their final weapon: refusal. Go on strike, and management can just flick a switch, rerouting your job to someone on another continent wearing a VR headset. No picket line, no negotiations, just latency management. Labour resistance, once a source of national leverage, becomes a connectivity issue. It’s hard to demand better conditions when your replacement logs in from another hemisphere before you’ve even finished printing the placards. This is one step closer to dystopia yet again dressed up as an amazing feat of technology that’s apparently for our own good. Yeah, right.

Japan isn’t alone in its experimentation; it’s just the first to run it with national discipline and a straight face. Other countries will follow, because replacing workers with machines has always been cheaper than fixing immigration policy or raising wages. We used to outsource our labour to countries where humans were cheaper. Now we outsource it to the cloud, the final offshore haven, where there are no unions and no bathroom breaks.

In fairness, the Philippines is trying to make this digital exodus work. It earns billions in remittances each year, and keeping workers at home means they spend locally instead of abroad. But there’s a dark math behind it: if you anchor wages to a domestic economy while producing value for a foreign one, you create a permanent discount on human life. A robot in Tokyo may cost millions, but a human behind a VR helmet in Manila goes for the price of a Netflix subscription. That’s how you get what researchers are starting to call digital colonialism, empires rebuilt not through guns and ships but through fibre optic cables and terms of service agreements.

The most amusing part of all this is that everyone involved seems genuinely proud of it. Japan gets to boast about its technological ingenuity, the Philippines gets a new export sector, and NVIDIA gets to sell more GPUs to train robots to be slightly better at grabbing bottles of green tea. Nobody seems bothered that the end game is a world where machines run stores, humans monitor machines, and AI monitors the humans for efficiency, until one day it politely suggests they’re no longer needed.

So here we are, hurtling toward a future where the labour market isn’t global so much as interplanetary. Robots in Tokyo will be controlled from Manila until they can control themselves. The “future of work” turns out to be no work at all, just data entry for machines that don’t need sleep, holidays, or existential dread. Maybe we should be grateful. For centuries we dreamt of making machines do our work so we could finally rest. Looks like we succeeded. We just forgot to ask what we’d live on once we stopped earning.