In the U.S., the backlash to artificial intelligence seems to be scaling almost as fast as the technology itself. Japan offers a different case study.
The country has been slow to adopt AI, but it¡¯s unusually calm about it. From the outside, its late start is easy to dismiss as another sign of digital underperformance. It may instead prove a valuable opportunity to skip some of the messier, early phases of diffusion that have been marked by hype, risk and expensive experimentation.
Japan can learn from the first-movers and skip to the impactful part of turning the technology into real economic infrastructure. AI has the potential to be more practical than performative here; there¡¯s less angst about displacing workers when the labor force is shrinking. Some of the nation¡¯s constraints, from how to care for an aging population to language barriers and software gaps, are exactly the kinds of problems AI can solve.
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