Industry 4.0 was first introduced in Germany. The term comes from the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and refers to the digitalization of production. In the last editorials we described how Japan then introduced the idea of Society 5.0, which looks at digitalization from a societal viewpoint aiming at the Super Smart Society. Information Technology (IT), especially Artificial Intelligence, will change many […]
The Japanese vision of Society 5.0 promotes the Super Smart Society, in which Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence will change a plethora of things. Much that is now performed by humans will then be carried out by computers. Sweeping changes in business and production will make jobs obsolete and create new ones at the same time. Society 5.0 will change […]
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has recently become a buzzword around the globe. The processing power of microchips is now strong enough for machines to do very complex tasks. In 2015, Google’s AlphaGo defeated the best human players in the board game Go, which was considered the last bastion of human advantage. It did not use pure computing power, but deep […]
Government and ministries strongly guide Japan’s science sector. So let us look into the new Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan that came into force this April, which should lead the path for the country’s Science and Technology (S&T) for the next five years. It places a strong emphasis on internationalization. The aim is to make Japan the “most innovation-friendly […]
Technology transfer from science to industry has not been particularly well developed in Japan traditionally. Yet the country’s level of science is excellent and offers a good source for industry and even foreign companies. Before turning to the latest developments in the Japanese Science and Technology system in my next article, let me today make a detour to the situation […]
Remarkably, in 1986 the mounting U.S. trade deficit in semiconductors with Japan even led to a trade agreement easing the situation. The Japanese semiconductor industry was expanding rapidly. Technologically, this was the outcome of the most successful of the so-called Big Projects I described in a previous article: The research association for the very-large-scale integrated circuit VLSI (1976-1980) helped push […]
