Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

This article was originally published by japantoday.com and can be viewed in full here

It’s clear the economy needs a boost, following decades of stagnation. Data on industrial production at the end of September signaled a second consecutive quarter of negative growth, according to the Financial Times.

Moreover, Abenomics is rapidly running out of “arrows” to aim at the economy, with the third arrow—structural reform—seemingly beginning to drag.

Abenomics puts the Internet of Things (IOT), big data, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) at the heart of its revitalization strategy. The goal is to accelerate development across all four fields, and formulate a vision for both the public and private sectors.

Of the four fields, Japan is strongest in robotics. SoftBank’s Pepper — described as the world’s first personal robot — grabbed the headlines when it went on sale. The product sold out as soon as it became available, with people eager to have a robot of their own.Yet Pepper still feels a long way from having the kind of intelligence we can expect in the future. For example, it wouldn’t pass the Turing Test, a benchmark in the science of AI for determining whether a machine exhibits behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

The launch of Pepper raises some important points. On the one hand, it demonstrates Japan’s robotics heritage, accumulated after years of successfully building industrial robots. On the other, however, it indicates relative weaknesses in areas such as IOT, big data and AI. After all, what have we seen in these areas to compete with the Pepper launch?

Mitsuru Ishizuka is a professor at Waseda University and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo. He has been working in AI at the latter institution since 1980. Mitsuru admits that Japan is considerably behind the United States in “deep learning,” a central technology in AI, although the country is working hard to catch up. For instance, the government has established a new AI research center, and is planning another one to promote AI in the country.

As he points out, big data is key for deep learning, and Japan lacks the expertise and financial strength of US multinationals such as Google Inc. or Facebook, Inc. “These companies can invest big money in AI and add the resulting new values to their services.

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