Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
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How life changes even as we live it! – never more swiftly than now. Last year is old, next year unimaginable. We don’t know where we’re going and race on regardless. Let the roller coaster carry us where it will. We’re embarked. There’s no stopping it.
“How will artificial intelligence change society?” asks Shukan Gendai (Nov 10). Still in its infancy, AI has already wrought enormous change. Fifteen years ago it was a concept. Today it’s a convenience. Tomorrow – more likely this evening – it will be a necessity. There will be no functioning without it.
And the day after tomorrow?
There is no precedent for the rapidity of this transformation. The Industrial Revolution, the standard against which vast change is measured, transformed us from farmers and craftsmen to tenders of machines and office workers. Horizons expanded, slow became fast, then faster, yesterday’s fast today’s slow. A climax of sorts was the advent of the motor car. Shukan Gendai recalls Ford’s first mass-produced Model T. The year was 1908 – a watershed. Humankind was mobile as never before. Horses vanished, gas stations proliferated, dirt tracks became roads, roads highways, and the rest is history.
What machine power was to muscle power, artificial intelligence is to brain power – today its supplement; tomorrow its replacement? The magazine’s fear seems hardly far-fetched. Routine office work has long been vulnerable. Even pre-AI, ordinary computers (once upon a time that was an oxymoron) could perform any number of tasks more rapidly and more efficiently than humans – and their brains didn’t go numb from fatigue, they didn’t demand time off for illness or vacations or children, they didn’t complain about working conditions. The writing was on the wall: humans are inadequate stokers of society’s machinery, and replaceable.
Barely in view then was an irony in plain sight now: The AI Revolution, like other revolutions before it, is devouring its own children. How to best secure employment in the AI Age? Simple: major in computer science. With a degree in computer science your future is assured. So it seemed. University computer science courses filled up, overflowed, and no doubt much of value was taught and much learned, but alas! Graduates are emerging only to find that the work they were trained for is being done by the very tool they were trained to design, improve and manipulate: AI.
Japan’s last “hiring ice age,” the 1990s and beyond, is still fresh and bitter. The 1.5 million hikikomori people aging in sad, solitary withdrawal from society are its most wrenching symbol. Do we face a recurrence? We do, Shukan Gendai fears. As AI penetrates every sector of the economy, redundancy spreads like a disease, claiming not only clerks and computer scientists but mid-level business executives, planners, content creators, teachers, translators, sales people, customer service personnel, hotel staff, tour guides – it’s a long list, probably incomplete.
Education itself is going AI, teaching it and teaching with it. University professors have long been appalled at the deterioration of high school education. They face freshmen ill prepared for serious, mature study. But the nature of study has changed. Now it’s the students who have the upper hand. Born into AI, they wield it like natives. Their professors at best are coping with a world not their own; at worst, failing to. Japan is said to be five years behind other advanced countries in weaving AI into its social, economic and intellectual fabric. Top universities worldwide, Oxford and Columbia leading the way, routinely use AI in lectures. Japanese universities allow professors to do so but don’t encourage it. Are students with chatbot wisdom at their fingertips smarter than their teachers with less agile fingers? Shukan Gendai’s bleak assessment: “The era of student respect for teachers has ended.”
How far ahead are we looking in foreseeing, or if that’s too strong a word imagining, a redefinition of wisdom, once meaning the peak of human intellectual achievement attainable by a very few, now signifying superhuman intellectual capacity within easy reach of everyone, thought itself superfluous because machines do it for us, if what machines do can properly be called thinking?
All that of course is highly speculative, maybe too much so. More firmly grounded in hard fact is AI’s energy voracity. “The typical AI data center consumes enough electricity to power 100,000 homes,” the website Energy Tracker Asia figures. It quotes U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres: “By 2030, data centers [globally] could consume as much electricity as all of Japan does today. This is not sustainable — unless we make it so.” We’d better. But how?
Ask the chatbots.
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Learn how to buy a home in Japan, including market trends, property buying procedures, and financing. The webinar will be held on December 13, 2025, from 11AM to 12PM (Japan Standard Time).
Click Here
TSUYAHIME is cherished by the people of Japan for its delicious taste, clear white color, gloss, grain size, sweetness, subtle flavor, and aroma.
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