The Impact of Digital Transformation on Japanese Social Structure(-2024)

The Council for Science, Technology, and Innovation envisions building a digital social infrastructure that integrates cyberspace and physical space and is capable of not only mitigating major social challenges like population aging, environmental problems, and pandemics but also opening new pathways toward all-inclusive social development. This, in a nutshell, is what digital transformation (DX) is all about.

DX initiatives in Japan, though, are noticeably lagging behind those of major, IT-leading countries. While AI (artificial intelligence) is expected to form the core of DX in the future, Japan lags far behind the United States, China, and Britain in research, development, and implementation of generative AI—particularly multimodal AI—and its score on AI indices is by no means any higher than that of Germany, France, India, South Korea, and Singapore.

This research project will therefore first investigate the strategies, policy trends, and available data of various countries to identify the DX—and particularly AI—initiatives Japan should take and the challenges it faces. It will then propose a set of DX policies and a new AI strategy leading to the realization of Society 5.0, making full use of verification experiments and questionnaire surveys to overcome the country’s challenges.

Notably, the program will seek to deepen understanding of AI, conducting empirical research on cloud infrastructure, open API, and loose coupling of data. Based on this, we hope to develop proposals for not only security and personal data policies but also policies to develop next-generation IT human resources and education policies to encourage greater creativity. These efforts, we believe, can contribute to the achievement of the SDGs and the improvement of people’s lives in the community.