"I don't feel particularly unhappy about my work being used to train AI," says Japanese novelist Rie Qudan. "Even if it is copied, I feel confident there's a part of me that will remain, which nobody can copy." The 34-year old author is talking to me via Zoom from her home near Tokyo, ahead of the publication of the English-language translation of her fourth novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo. The book attracted controversy in Japan when it won a prestigious prize, despite being partly written by ChatGPT. At the heart of Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a Japanese architect, Sara Machina, who has been commissioned to build a new tower to house convicted criminals. It will be a representation of what one character – not without irony – calls "the extraordinary broadmindedness of the Japanese people", in that the tower will house offenders in compassionate comfort.

Japan has been developing robots to care for older people for over two decades, with public and private investment accelerating markedly in the 2010s. By 2018, the national government alone had spent well in excess of $300 million funding research and development for such devices. At first glance, the reason for racing to roboticize care may seem obvious. Almost any news article, presentation, or academic paper on the subject is prefaced by an array of anxiety-inducing facts and figures about Japan's aging population: birth rates are below replacement levels, the population has started to shrink, and though in 2000 there were about four working-age adults for every person over 65, by 2050 the two groups will be near parity. The number of older people requiring care is increasing rapidly, as is the cost of caring for them.

For a while, Taiki Sakurai wasn't sure Netflix was serious about anime. When he was interviewing to be the company's chief anime producer back in 2017, Netflix suits insisted he'd get to form superhero teams of anime creators, manage the direction of a couple shows. Even then, Netflix was regarded as a streaming platform, not exactly a studio. Netflix is an American tech company. Anime is a Japanese artform.

The waves of the third artificial intelligence (AI) boom are now sweeping across Japan in the same way as earlier fads did in the 1950s and the 1980s. Referring to the ongoing craze in the country, leading Japanese economic magazine Shukan toyo keizai wrote in its 5 December 2015 issue, "not a single day passes by without hearing about AI." Many companies in Japan are making AI-related announcements one after another. Seminars on AI are held in Tokyo almost every day. But the question we must ask is this: Is the development of AI good news for mankind? From early on, many people in the world outside Japan forecast a dystopian future if AI were to surpass human intelligence. To cite an early example, Bill Joy, a U.S. computer scientist dubbed the Thomas Edison of the Internet, cautioned that robots with higher intelligence may compete with humans and threaten the latter's survival when they become able to self-replicate in "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," an article he published in 2000. More recently, British theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking expressed the fear that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Speaking in concert, Microsoft founder Bill Gates also said, "I am in the camp that is concerned about the threat of super intelligence [to human beings］." Behind their concern, there is the feeling of unease that humans will stop being the owners of the highest intelligence on earth. High intelligence is the very thing that has allowed humans to consider themselves as special beings distinguished from other animals. What will happen if and when AI surpasses human intelligence? Will humans really be able to continue their dominance as rulers of the earth in this situation? Won't machines deprive humans of many intellectual jobs and dominate them, in effect? These arguments about the possible threats posed by AI have been small in number in Japan until recently, however.

JIJI – Approximately 12 percent of Japanese people aged 10 to 29 play digital and video games for six hours or more on their days off school or work, a survey showed Wednesday. The survey also found that those who play games for long periods tend to show signs of addiction, such as not being able to stop playing despite feeling mental and physical distress or negative influences on their studies or work. The fact-finding investigation was conducted with health ministry support by the National Hospital Organization Kurihama Medical and Addiction Center in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. The first survey of its kind came after the World Health Organization decided to recognize gaming disorder as an official medical condition. Some 85 percent of survey respondents played digital or video games in the past year, with around 80 percent using smartphones to play games.

ISLAMABAD: President Dr Arif Alvi has stressed upon strengthening of Pakistan-Japan cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) as Pakistan has huge potential in terms of more than half of its young population. During an interview with the Japanese News 24 (NTV), the president said he had launched the artificial intelligence training system initiative with target to produce about 100,000 AI experts within two years. Dr Alvi is in Japan on the invitation of the Japanese government to attend the enthronement ceremony of Emperor of Japan Naruhito. The president invited the Japanese software companies to invest in Pakistan and said it was possible to engage in the software development and artificial intelligence development. He said there were a lot of Japanese investment destinations in Pakistan.

Phan Hoang Tu Linh feels she has gotten the hang of working in a Japanese convenience store now, but she admits she found it tough at first. "We have three cash registers in our store but only two lines to wait in," says the 23-year-old Vietnamese national, who came to Japan to study at a Japanese-language school in Tokyo in July 2017 and started working part-time at a convenience store two months later. "One of the customers went before another customer who was supposed to be first, but I didn't see it because I was too busy," Phan says. "The customer got really angry and started shouting at me that they were supposed to be first. I felt really bad after that. My co-workers all told me that there was no need for the customer to get so angry and that it wasn't my fault. Sometimes people bring their stress from the workplace and take it out on us."

This article originally appeared in Vulture. When the first trailer arrived for Isle of Dogs last fall, I had three immediate, consecutive reactions: One: Oh, no. Two: Wait, I take that back. I'm going to be a good critic and reserve judgement until the week of March 23. In the week since Isle of Dogs' initial limited release, a measured, varied, and nuanced discussion about Wes Anderson's use of Japanese culture--and other cultures in general--has happened in fits and starts.

I published a post about the current status of "Data Scientist" in Japan, as a periodic follow-up analysis since two years ago. Its trend still remains, but it's beyond my anticipation at that time. Indeed growing trend of "Artificial Intelligence" in Japan is steeper than that in English, and "Data Scientist" is now getting to be forgotten by people, although in the global market data scientist is still a major role spreading data science including both statistics and machine learning across industries. Although I did not explicitly mention in the post, I guess that Japanese people may think that data scientist is a professional for statistical analysis although artificial intelligence engineer is one for machine learning or artificial intelligence as a misleading technology. Two years ago, already I've had seen some disappointment at "Data Science" powered by statistics and supported by data scientists.

I published a post about the current status of "Data Scientist" in Japan, as a periodic follow-up analysis since two years ago. Its trend still remains, but it's beyond my anticipation at that time. Indeed growing trend of "Artificial Intelligence" in Japan is steeper than that in English, and "Data Scientist" is now getting to be forgotten by people, although in the global market data scientist is still a major role spreading data science including both statistics and machine learning across industries. Although I did not explicitly mention in the post, I guess that Japanese people may think that data scientist is a professional for statistical analysis although artificial intelligence engineer is one for machine learning or artificial intelligence as a misleading technology. Two years ago, already I've had seen some disappointment at "Data Science" powered by statistics and supported by data scientists.