Influencing every area of Japanese culture from the workplace to the dating world, the futuristic vision of Japan you see in sci-fi movies is already here. The difference is that it’s not trying to kill us — it’s a hidden part of everyday life.
So what exactly is AI?
It’s not just super intelligent robots. Weak artificial intelligence (AI) is built for a particular purpose, typically by businesses to provide a particular type of service. When Facebook automatically detects the faces of your friends in a creepy way, it’s using a branch of AI called “deep learning,” where AI is trained on previous photos of your tagged friends and general photos of people. This first identifies the presence of a face and then predicts just whose face it is. As with humans, AI isn’t perfect and sometimes it will get it wrong.
Strong AI is closer to our "Bladerunner"-esque imaginations. The “stronger” the AI, the more it can “think” for itself and seem sentient. We are only just scratching the surface of developing strong AI. However, some projects are getting close, such as Google’s Deep Mind, which can navigate through complex game levels and can even walk by itself… well, sort of.
Why does Japan embrace it?
Partially due to its depiction in media, the Japanese depiction of strong AI as cute, intelligent companions through famous childhood TV series such as "Doraemon," or amazingly human-like and emotive characters in many anime series. In comparison, the depiction of AI in Western media (often in a cool, modern, post-apocalyptic style like "Ex Machina") can paint AI in a negative light, and the concept is feared by many.
Japan is entering uncharted territory for a modern economy. A consistently low birth rate has shrunk the working-age population by around 10 million since its mid-1990s peak, with another 20 million set to disappear from workplaces in the coming decades. The situation is becoming critical, with nearly 1.5 vacancies for every jobseeker and chronic shortages in sectors such as nursing care, manufacturing, construction and parcel delivery.
At a time when the government is pressuring companies to cut infamously long working hours, raise wages and ensure holidays are taken, and in a country still unwilling to countenance mass immigration, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) look to be the only solutions.
“We tried out various kinds of robots to see which would work best for us. We’ve gradually increased their use and now have 20 different models operating, including robots for nursing care, rehabilitation, communication and recreation,” explains Silver Wing’s Yukari Sekiguchi, who oversees the programme.
The company’s staff used to regularly injure their backs lifting residents, leading to them being off work or quitting the profession altogether, a major problem given the tight labour market. Workers can now use robots they stand inside to help them do such heavy lifting.
“A lot of people thought that elderly people would be scared or uncomfortable with robots, but they are actually very interested and interact naturally with them. They really enjoy talking to them and their motivation goes up when they use the rehabilitation robots, helping them to walk again more quickly,” says Sekiguchi.
Japan may be the best-placed country to cope with the advance of automation – it’s likely to cause less unemployment than elsewhere, given the shortage of workers and lifetime employment practises.
Unemployment has fallen to 2.8 per cent and a record-high 97.6 per cent of new university graduates found jobs by the start of the business year in April.
The situation should be a boon for workers, but gains are being distributed unequally. Despite the tight labour market and many companies logging record profits, wage inflation remains stubbornly sluggish.
“There is a shortage of manual workers, but an excess of white-collar workers, especially middle-aged men,” says Naohiro Yashiro, a labour economist and dean of the Global Business Department Showa Women’s University in Tokyo.
“The government has set an inflation target, but it’s not happening yet. My explanation of this mystery is there is a kind of structural reform going on. The seniority based wage system, whereby employees’ wages in Japan rise rapidly with their age is not sustainable anymore, with the ageing of the population,” says Yashiro, an adviser on labour economics to three prime ministers.
Japanese Company Develops Dual-Arm Construction Robot
Companies are thus trying to halt automatic salary raises for workers in their 40s and 50s, and increase pay for younger ones, with one largely offsetting the other, according to Yashiro.
It is these mid-level workers who would normally be most at threat from the oncoming wave of robotics, AI and other new technologies. But in Japan, they should be saved from unemployment, if not wage stagnation, according to Dr Martin Schulz, senior economist at the Fujitsu Research Institute.
“Much of the debate about automation squeezing workers out of the labour market is not an issue in Japan. Wages at the lower end won’t be squeezed much because automation is costly, so the cheapest workers won’t be replaced. At the top end, people with skills are usually helped by digitalisation because they benefit from new systems,” says Schulz.
“The squeeze would be at the mid-level. But they are comparatively protected in Japan by labour regulations. So they are not hit as hard as they are in, for example, the UK or US, where we are seeing political disruptions as a result of this,” says Schulz, referring to the Brexit vote and election of Donald Trump.
But neither the government’s employment reforms nor automation are the solution to Japan’s labour problems, according to Toyonori Sugita, owner of Daimaru Seisakusho, a metalworking factory just outside Tokyo.
“If we put up wages and reduced hours as the government is suggesting, we’d go bankrupt. But the shortage of workers in technical industries is terrible now,” says Sugita, who is looking at bringing back skilled workers in their 70s.
“Automation isn’t the answer either. The type of work that can be automated is going overseas to other Asian countries; work that requires high levels of technical skills is what remains in Japan and can be profitable,” says Sugita.
“We need more workers from overseas, from the Philippines and places like that. If the government is going to do something, it should promote that,” adds Sugita.
But with advocating mass immigration still seen as political suicide in Japan, the march of the robots looks set to continue.
Japan is also more susceptible to the isolation and fetishizing that can come with accepting AI as a companion. This particularly applies to a small section of otaku (geek) culture, where virtual popstars and girlfriends are considered more desirable than human interactions because “they” are tailored to your particular needs.
Last week, a Japanese company called Gatebox opened pre-orders for a new breed of virtual assistant. While Alexa and Google Home are a bit lacking in the personality department, Gatebox users get to interact with a 3-D anime character called Azumi Hikari. She’s being pitched as both a handy helper—and a pseudo-girlfriend.
Yes, it’s icky (kimoi in Japanese). But it’s more than that. The Gatebox encapsulates (literally) the social isolation that has strangled Japan’s once-vibrant economy.
With computing technology developing so rapidly, it isn’t hard to imagine communicative humanoid robots being put to work at hospitals and nursing homes in the near future. But whether Japan can become the world’s robot capital by 2020 is another question.
