Is AI able to address Japan's labor shortage?

Is AI able to address Japan's labor shortage?

Japan is experiencing a labor shortage as a result of population decline. A lot of people are expecting artificial intelligence (AI) can fill in the gaps.

Damaged or deformed fruits and vegetables are difficult to market in a nation noted for its perfectionist culture.

Additionally, selling a package of gyoza that has some damage on it is very unacceptable if you are a specialized producer of Japanese dumplings, such as the company Osaka Ohsho.

Unfortunately, Eat&Holdings, the company's parent company, lacked the staff to inspect each and every dumpling as demand grew during the epidemic.

It then looked to technology for a solution. It debuted a state-of-the-art facility in January 2023, complete with AI-powered cameras trained to identify any defective gyoza on the assembly lines.

These days, this plant produces two dumplings every two seconds. Compared to the other Osaka Ohsho manufacturing facilities, that is twice as fast.

Spokesman Keiko Handa states, "We have reduced the manpower on the manufacturing process line by almost 30% by implementing AI."

Recently, the company debuted I-Robo, an AI-powered kitchen robot, at one of its Tokyo eateries. The firm claims that technology will assist address the labor scarcity problem since it takes time to educate cooks.

The lack of labor in Japan is probably just going to become worse.

For 13 years, the population, which is now 124.35 million, has been declining. Additionally, it is predicted that between 2022 and 2040, Japan's labor force would continue to shrink by 12%, leaving the nation short of 11 million workers by that point.

With 29% of its population 65 years of age or over, Asia's second-biggest economy already has the oldest population in the world.

With only 758,631 kids born in the nation last year, it also boasts one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Since the start of recordkeeping in the 19th century, that figure is the lowest.

The government's attempts to increase birth rates have not yielded much fruit. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that his nation was "on the brink of not being able to function".

Numerous people have inquired about the possibility of job theft resulting from the widespread use of AI. However, others in Japan feel that AI cannot come soon enough.

The average age of a farmer in Japan is at 68.4, making farming one of the fastest aging sectors in the nation. Here, artificial intelligence is being utilized to identify various illnesses, pests, and weeds in order to detect and prevent them early on.

The agricultural chemical manufacturer Nihon Nohyaku has created the smartphone app Nichino AI. The app diagnoses crops that are having problems and suggests potential pesticide treatments when a farmer snaps a photo of the affected areas.

According to Nihon Nohyaku's Kentarou Taniguchi, "The accuracy rate is roughly 70 to 80%, so it is not as good as real experts, but far superior to ordinary farmers."

"The longer we work on this app, the more we realise how outstanding the human experts are," he says. "But the number of experts is falling, so that corresponds to where AI tools can come in handy."

Using the app for three years, farmer Kensuke Takahashi concurs that AI is one of the technologies that will assist modernize the industry. "The number of farmers is falling sharply like a rollercoaster," according to him, "but Japan's total amount of produce is increasing."

Although Mr. Takahashi concedes that some elderly farmers may be wary of new technology like artificial intelligence (AI), he thinks these innovations are contributing to higher levels of productivity. "Once you try out a drone to spray pesticide, you cannot go back to manual spraying," he says with a grin.

What about language instructors, a field that has historically had a shortage?

Japan has consistently scored poorly in English proficiency despite the government's continuous attempts to raise the country's English speaking population. This is because there aren't enough qualified English instructors in Japan.

A start-up company named Ecumenopolis has created an AI-powered online tool that enables users to speak English with its avatar for fifteen minutes at a time in an attempt to make up for this shortcoming. There are already 50 schools nationwide that have implemented it.

At the conclusion of the previous year, pupils at Narita Kokusai High School, which is located outside of Tokyo, were instructed to practice it at home for three months.

According to instructor Shoko Takiguchi, "AI decides what kind of English conversations each student can have as well as varies its questions," as she told the BBC. "It is difficult to have one-on-one conversations with every learner Report Phrase so that was an advantage."

Students get feedback in six categories at the conclusion of each conversation: vocabulary, grammar, fluency, and pronunciation.

One of the pupils, Ko Hanyuan, claims that using AI to identify one's areas of weakness was simple and effective. However, he responds negatively when asked whether he would prefer AI to his online course. Why? There's nothing human about it.

Ms. Takiguchi concurs: "It is useful to improve your speaking skills, but I found conversations to be unnatural." She continues by saying that the AI cannot determine the user's response, state of health, or tone of voice.

So it won't take the place of actual teachers? "AI should not and cannot replace teachers or English lessons in the classroom," emphasizes Katsutoshi Fukumizu, the administrator of the school.

Japan's government is likewise experimenting with AI.

Yokosuka City in Kanagawa prefecture has begun using AI chatbot ChatGPT to assist with administrative chores like meeting summaries and transcriptions in response to a labor shortage.

The city's spokeswoman, Kohei Ota, said, "We deal with enormous amounts of documents, and it takes a very long time as well as effort to create those documents."

"We have calculated after our trial we as humans save 22,700 hours of work annually," he continues, citing ChatGPT's assistance.

AI is also employed in staff training at the national government's Digital Agency, which was founded in 2021 to address inefficiencies in public administration.

"Our workforce hasn't been able to keep up with the amount of work we want to do," the agency's Masanori Kusunoki adds. In order to "explore how we can use AI, and spread the information" to the commercial sector, he continues, the government is working on this.

However, Mr. Kusunoki does not believe that the demand for labor will decrease as AI advances.

Japan, a nation where change is gradual, is adopting AI's power more readily than other nations.

This is due to the fact that it has spent more than ten years researching every potential remedy to deal with the twin problems of an aging and declining population, including robots, women, the elderly, and foreign labor.

Although AI has the potential to improve worker productivity, it is still far from being able to completely replace human labor.