Governments in Japan are also experimenting with AI.
Faced with labour shortages, Yokosuka City in Kanagawa prefecture has starting using AI chatbot ChatGPT to help with administrative tasks such as transcribing and summarising meetings.
“We deal with enormous amount of documents, and it takes a very long time and effort to create those documents,” says the city’s spokesperson Kohei Ota.
Thanks to ChatGPT, “we have calculated after our trial that we save 22,700 hours of work annually,” he adds.
At the national government’s Digital Agency, which was established in 2021 to overcome inefficiency in public administration, AI is also used to train its staff.
“There are so many things that we want to do, but our manpower hasn’t been able to keep up,” says Masanori Kusunoki from the agency. He adds that the government is trying to “explore how we can use AI, and spread the information” to the private sector.
But Mr Kusunoki doesn’t think that the rise of AI will mean fewer workers are needed.
In a country where changes happen slowly, Japan is embracing the power of AI with less reluctance than others.
That is because it has looked into every possible solution to tackle the double whammy of an ageing and shrinking population for more than a decade: from robots, to women, the elderly and foreign workers.
While AI may help increase the efficiency of the workforce, it is nowhere near ready to replace human workers.
