Artificial Intelligence in the Aftermath of Algorithmic Modernity: Some Key Contributions and Open Issues in Japanese Sociology

As the great wave of AI breaks across the world, emerging automated technology creeps more and more into the fabric of our lives. From personal virtual assistants and chatbots to self-driving vehicles and telerobotics, AI is now threaded into large tracts of everyday life, and increasingly reshapes society and the economy. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, believes that AI ushers into existence a “fourth industrial revolution.” The first profound industrial revolution was steam-powered, the second electrical, the third the arrival of the computer age, and Schwab considers today's AI revolution “unlike anything humankind has experienced before.” AI is not so much an advancement of technology, but rather the metamorphosis of all technology (Schwab 2016). But what, exactly, is “revolutionary” about AI? To begin with, politics changes dramatically as a consequence of AI. Technological change and how to achieve digital literacy across society, it could be argued, are now the name of the game in key areas of politics. The automation of jobs is the most debated of them all, but others include self-driving cars, sex robots, socially-assistive robotics, killer drones, and many other areas. In many respects, it is a new agenda, at least in terms of public policy. The traditional welfare state, for example, was very much based providing remedies to the fallout from problems once they had happened—if you lose your job, the state will provide benefits until you find a new one. Today, we live in a very different world. We live in a time where robots move boxes in factories as well as conduct shelf auditing in supermarkets, and where complex algorithms complete tax returns and trade on financial markets. The consequences of our increasingly automated global world involve a shattering of political orthodoxies. We have to be much more interventionist, and craft policy thinking to cope with the unexpected, unanticipated shifts stemming from the digital revolution. Another major consequence of the AI revolution is that our entire parameters of risk and opportunity radically change. Complex systems such as machine learning and advanced robotics are characterized by unpredictability, uncertainty, zigzags, and reversals. Policy attempts aimed at coping with complex technological systems often produce unintended consequences, revealing or generating other issues or problems, and other solutions or synergies in turn emerge in response to such interdependencies between adaptive systems. This has major ramifications for nation-states, which not only exist in systemic relations with other nation-states but also have now to cope with the spread of artificial intelligence and its global offshoots, including offshoring, outsourcing, reshoring, and the like. Japan, like other advanced countries, has had to deal with these challenging technological developments and oftentimes disruptive consequences accompanying the rise of artificial intelligence and its reshaping of society, politics, and the configuration of the global economy. Japan's engagement with artificial intelligence has been substantially shaped by its powerful technological and industry sectors. In a society finely attuned to the relationship between technological innovation and everyday life, leading enterprises such as SoftBank Group, Preferred Networks, and Abeja have come to represent the institutional dynamism of Japan's AI revolution. Alongside corporate giants including Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Morpho, these companies have not only advanced robotics, personalized healthcare, and data analytics but also have contributed to a massive transformation of social and economic life, where expertise, capital, and culture converge in the pursuit of intelligent systems and the increasing automation of everyday life. The development of AI in Japan, however, extends far beyond engineering laboratories and corporate strategy rooms. While Japan's most celebrated contributors to AI, such as Hideyuki Nakashima, Koichi Hori, and Hitoshi Matsubara, hail from the fields of computer science and engineering, other significant voices, though less audible, have also made important contributions to the great AI debate. In this connection, Japanese sociology emerges as idiosyncratic and innovative, offering a range of vital perspectives on how technology interacts with institutional structures, social relations and cultural values, which in turn has influenced both social policy and public understandings of AI. This article was conceived as a modest contribution to an inventory of some of the key conceptual developments occurring in recent Japanese sociology, addressing AI in particular and the digital revolution in general. My aim is to offer a sympathetic overview of several central currents of Japanese social theory, rather than an exhaustive portfolio of perspectives from Japanese social science more generally. The first section of the article will present a brief overview of the “great global debate” over AI and I shall highlight some of the contributions that I have made in my own writings regarding the advent of the digital revolution. In the second section of the article, I turn to Japan and highlight some key developments in respect of the opportunities and challenges accompanying developments and innovations in artificial intelligence. In the third section of the chapter, I shall also provide short expositions of three conceptual positions on AI and the digital revolution developed in recent Japanese sociology. In the final section, I will bring together the main threads of analysis and offer some concluding remarks concerning the shape of things (at once technological and social) in a world of advanced AI. The rise of AI has stirred massive global controversy. Not just in universities and think-tanks, but across industries and business circles. For many, the very idea of AI generates alarm. The advancement of AI represents a major threat to jobs, employment, enterprise, and industrial manufacture, stoking up anxieties that pervade many other areas of life too. The more powerful automated systems become, the more many people worry about the risk that AI might result in some irreversible global nightmare. In this scenario, the rise of AI is potentially catastrophic. AI is equated here with an apocalyptic social future. Another response, albeit very different in perspective, views these technological breakthroughs more positively. This response concentrates on new possibilities, hopes—and dreams for a better world. On the face of things, AI is a breakthrough science, promising great opportunities for the reshaping of economies, societies, and political choices today. In this scenario, the coming AI revolution foreshadows the opening of a new era, one which will radically transform people's daily habits and the world in which they live. AI is a new driver of production and will generate new sources of economic growth, changing how work is done and dramatically increasing growth in businesses worldwide. 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