Tadashi Shikimori(Chief Fellow, Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies)

April 2018 to March 2019

   By putting dramatic improvements in computer performance and radical new technologies such as deep learning into practical use, the introduction of AI technology has been promoted in various fields including manufacturing and marketing in the private sector, as well as medical treatment. In particular, with regard to the use of AI by the government sector in Japan, the digital government implementation plan of 2018 stated that “we will actively consider introducing AI in administrative services provide greater benefits to our users’’. AI is expected to contribute to dramatic improvements in the quality and efficiency of operations and services in order to respond to increasingly complex administrative issues in the face of increasingly severe personnel and budgetary constraints in the agencies of government and regional government. AI is expected to make a large contribute to revitalizing local economies by facilitating tasks such as the use of AI for city management, data integration, sharing data for multiple purposes, and sharing AI locally between specific applications.

   Therefore, in this study, we surveyed and analyzed the systems, policies and social issues at governments and regional administrative organizations in Europe, the United States, and Japan, including field surveys of demonstration projects in developed countries, in order to discover which areas AI should be applied to, and how it should be utilized in advanced cases. Specifically, we sought to analyze and make  proposals for the solution of institutional issues regarding: (1) the regulation of AI-related technology trends and the conditions for their use in government, (2) the creation of judgment criteria concerning the applicability of AI, (3) the investigation of how AI can be applied to the government sector, (4) trends in digital government policies and AI utilization in various countries, (5) the use of AI in regional government, and (6) the use of AI in national government.