Motoyuki Matsunaga(Senior Fellow, Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies)

April 2019 to March 2020

Along with developments in IoT and AI, recent changes in digital technology have added block chain (BC), and we are seeing accelerating change in industry and society, and a paradigm shift in the field of information and communication.

The Internet is an enormous network connected to all kinds of devices, such as smartphone cameras and surveillance cameras in the streets, giving rise to the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT). At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI), which thinks and makes decisions like humans do, is developing, and block-chain technology, which is being used to create new economic mechanisms such as virtual currencies, is spreading. These three technologies are being integrated further to produce new industrial and societal infrastructure. In these ways, the potential of digital technology is increasing, bringing unprecedented new changes to society.

Each of these technologies began to appear starting in around 2007, with IoT from the fields of sensor networks and robotics technology, AI from algorithms such as deep learning, and block-chain from peer-to-peer distributed application technology, and in only about ten years, new services are being produced, but in the future, more integrated design with these technologies will be needed for creating social services.

Advanced system technologies that are currently attracting attention are based on ideas that are quite unconventional, enabling hardware and software to cooperate without remote instructions. Such features are also found in autonomous distributed systems such as self-driving vehicles and autonomous robots. In next-generation digital platforms, both extremes of mechanism will coexist. Some will operate based on integrated instructions, and they will cooperate with autonomous mechanisms that can operate even without instructions, as described above. As such, it will be necessary to build a new world view of ICT social services, designed from the perspective of humans and society, with diverse individual subjects. Another feature of this type of advanced innovation is that it is created on SNS, employing elements such as open source and crowd sourcing. As such, these autonomous distributed systems incorporating AI also have broad potential, having affinity with a wide range of people and communities and capable of taking a variety of forms (polymorphic).

In this research, we conducted a study of design concepts and social services, applying complex service technologies as social technologies, advancing artificial intelligence technology and incorporating many types of value-creation model in the smart cities of the world.