Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the development of the Japanese government’s approach to AI governance and ethics, based on an analysis of official guidelines and policy documents as well as semi-structured interviews with several of the architects of Japan’s AI policies who helped write them.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, the Japanese government has released a series of guidelines and policy documents setting out positions on the ethics and governance of AI, culminating in the 2019 publication of the “Social Principles of Human-Centric AI” and a new national AI Strategy. Amid the recent global scramble to develop AI governance rules and ethical frameworks, Japan has aimed to take a leadership role in their international agreement and harmonisation, brokering broad consensus on basic ethical and governance principles at the OECD and G7, and actively promoting these principles at venues including the Council of Europe and the Global Partnership on AI.

A central element of the documents is their presentation of AI as both a product and an agent of radical societal transformation. They talk of building an “AI-Ready Society”, a “human-centered ‘Wisdom Network Society’”, a “robot society”, and a “super-smart” “Society 5.0” in which cyberspace and physical space are seamlessly integrated. While AI is expected to transform society, society must first be transformed to prepare the ground for AI, in order to achieve a pluralist, internationalist, and utopian future in which “national borders, industries, academia, governments, race, gender, nationality, age, political convictions and religion” are transcended, in order to achieve “total globalization” (Social Principles 2019).

This paper examines the development of the Japanese government’s approach to AI governance and ethics, based on an analysis of key documents as well as semi-structured interviews with several of the architects of Japan’s AI policies who helped write them. It explores in what ways and to what extent the techno-futurist rhetoric of internationalism and radical societal transformation contained in the documents connects with the Japanese government’s wider conservative yet technocratic vision (Robertson 2018), considers what socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) are being constructed through such visions of the future, and looks at how firmly grounded they are in the reality of development communities and practices in Japan.