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AntSoc12


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An AI revolution in health and social care? Trajectories, expectations, and challenges of AI development, governance, and ethics in Japan 
Convenors:
Giulia De Togni (The University of Edinburgh)
James Wright (The Alan Turing Institute)
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Discussant:
Selma Šabanović (Indiana University)
Section:
Anthropology and Sociology
Sessions:
Friday 27 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels

Short Abstract:

The Japanese government is vying to lead the world in the development and governance of AI, which it views as a key technology for transforming the future of public and personal health and care. The panel investigates gaps between hype and reality as these aspirations begin to be put into practice.

Long Abstract:

"Japan is the first country to tackle many social issues confronting a mature society, such as the declining birthrate and aging population, labor shortage, rural depopulation, and increased fiscal spending. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a key technology to rescue society from these problems, to address the goals set forth in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and to build a sustainable world." So states the government-supported "Social Principles of Human-Centric AI" report (2019:1), a key input into the 2019 national AI Strategy. Both documents are imbued with a rhetoric of technology saving Japan from current and future societal crises that has long characterised Japanese policy around techno-science (Šabanović 2014; Frumer 2018; Robertson 2018; Wright 2019). However, even by previous standards, discourse around the future potential and imagined impacts of AI is reaching new heights of aspiration, with government reports calling for seemingly fundamental transformations of Japanese society into a pluralist, diverse, and internationalist high-tech utopia.

In particular, health, medical, and long-term care - already testing grounds for Japan's emerging care robotics industry and many other health technologies (Brucksch & Schultz 2018) - have been presented as priority areas for the development and governance of AI in Japan since the 2017 AI Technology Strategy and Industrialization Roadmap. As the Japanese government is now preparing to present its latest visions of what it calls "Society 5.0" to the Osaka Expo 2025 under the theme "Designing Future Society for Our Lives", this panel critically examines how AI and related technologies such as social robots are imagined or expected to contribute to futures of health and social care, and how key actors in the government and industry propose that they be governed. We invite a discussion drawing on the following questions:

- What forms of AI and related technologies such as robotics are actually being developed and deployed in health and care?

- How does the aspirational rhetoric of AI connect with realities of use?

- How are the ethics and governance of AI systems being conceptualised, drawn up into guidelines and principles, and operationalised?

- Where is the "human" in "human-centric AI"?

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, -