In Search of the Fantasy of a Super Smart Society

  Articles that claim that Japan is falling behind in the competition to develop AI stand out.

American companies like IBM, Google, and Apple are taking the lead in AI research. The Japanese government is holding a conference on “Artificial Intelligence Technology Strategy”,but it may be too late.

  Since the fervor around artificial intelligence died down in the 80s Japan has become silent. When I was at the MIT Media Lab at the end of the 90s, the AI advocates were quite active, while interest in AI was waning within Japanese companies.

　

  Even if we try to light the fire of deep learning again, in these panicked times, this is a contest in which American corporations have invested trillions of yen, so it is no longer at a level that universities can handle by taxation. Japan’s late arrival to the contest is not an issue of a lack of talented people in universities, it is an issue of corporate investment.

  If Japan still has a chance to prevail, they should be more focused on use than development. In the same way that Japanese high school girls have transformed IT /mobile technology via emoticons and photos taken on mobile phones.

 Japan should position themselves as a developed country by introducing new technology related to pop culture and other fields that they excel in or in the fields of welfare, nursing care, or disaster prevention, and produce industry and culture.

  And the government should lead the way to more straightforward use of AI. First of all, the higher officials in the government should be given AI, and show how serious they are about it by using it themselves.

  However, it is important to view AI as a target for investment and sales, but to see it only in that way would be to mistake the general trend.

  It is customary to call AI and IoT the “The 4th Industrial Revolution”  or Industry 4.0. With the previous revolutions being as follows, 1st: Light Industry,  2nd: Heavy Industry,  3rd: Information Industry.

  However, I wonder whether this is really an “industry” revolution. If that were the case you would expect industry to be the first to be reformed, but I think the effect on culture and society are much greater.

　Even if we position IT as the 3rd industrial revolution, was it really an industry revolution for us? Wasn't it more of a cultural revolution? More important than the growth of the IT industry and the industry becoming more IT based, I think a bigger change was the way in which everyone was equipped with, and able to transmit, information.

  If we think of the 17th century industrial revolution as a change that only occurs once in 300 years, I think the information revolution that resulted from IT, was an expression of innovation that only occurs once in a 1000 years. Maybe then AI/IoT is a reformation that humans have yet to achieve, that only occurs once every 10000 years. So wouldn't it be too small a strategy to force it into the category of “industrial”.

  Therefore, alongside the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Government of Japan decided to call their efforts towards a super smart society "Society 5.0". In other words the fifth revolution in civilization following after the 1st: Hunting, 2nd: Agriculture, 3rd: Industry, and 4th: Information.

  Recently, a telecommunications white paper from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications focused on the surplus IT consumers. The value of IT cannot be measured by GDP. Even if the sales of the industry do not increase, the effect on user's money, time, and psychology are considerable. Which means that it exceeds the value of an industry, and we are faced with the question of how to view it as civilization, which involves society and culture.

　 It's less a matter of how AI will impact investment and sales, and more a matter of what we should expect from AI, and how we can expect AI to shake up society. With that as the index by which I judge this trend, I want to start making countermeasures. However, this effort has only just begun.