Can AI help solve Japan’s labour shortages?

Many people have questioned whether our jobs will be stolen since AI has taken over the world by storm. But for some in Japan, AI cannot arrive fast enough.

The average age of a Japanese farmer is now 68, making farming one of the nation’s fastest-aging industries. 4 years. For early detection and prevention, different types of diseases, pests, and weeds are being used in this AI research.

Nihon Nohyaku, which manufactures agricultural chemicals, has developed a smartphone app called Nichino AI. The app determines what is wrong and which pesticide may be required when a farmer looks at a picture of struggling crops.

” The accuracy rate is about 70 to 80 %, so it is not as good as real experts, but better than ordinary farmers,” says Kentarou Taniguchi from Nihon Nohyaku.

” The longer we work on this app, the more we realise how excellent the human experts are,” he explains. ” But the number of experts is shrinking, so AI tools can be useful in this situation. “

Kensuke Takahashi, a farmer who has used the app for three years, acknowledges that AI is one of the tools that will aid in the sector’s modernization. ” The number of farmers is falling sharply like a rollercoaster,” he says,” but Japan’s total amount of produce is increasing. “

Mr. Takahashi acknowledges that some older farmers may be skeptical of any recent advances in technology, such as AI, but he believes that these farmers are assisting in increasing efficiency levels. ” Once you try out a drone to spray pesticide, you cannot go back to manual spraying,” he laughs.

What about language teachers, a field that has always been in need of them?

Despite the government’s repeated efforts to increase the number of English speakers, Japan has constantly ranked low in English proficiency, due to the lack of teachers who can effectively speak the language.

A start-up called Ecumenopolis has created an AI-powered online tool that allows users to communicate with its avatar for 15 minutes per session to address this shortfall. It has already been used in 50 schools across the nation.

At the end of last year, students were asked to use Narita Kokusai High School, which is located on the outskirts of Tokyo, to practice there for three months.

Teacher Shoko Takiguchi tells the BBC that AI chooses the types of English conversations each student can have and the types of questions it asks. That was advantageous because it was difficult to have one-on-one conversations with each student. “

At the end of each conversation, students get feedback in six areas including pronunciation, grammar, fluency and vocabulary.

” With AI, it is easy to find out what my weakness was, so it was efficient,” says one of the students, Ko Hanyuan. However, when asked if he would pick AI over his online tutorial, he replies no. Why? It lacks the human touch.

Ms Takiguchi agrees:” It is useful to improve your speaking skills, but I found conversations to be unnatural. ” She adds that the AI is unable to assess the user’s reaction, physical condition, or change in tone.

So it wo n’t replace human teachers? ” AI can not and should not replace English lessons at school or teachers,” emphasises the school’s principal Katsutoshi Fukumizu.

Governments in Japan are also conducting AI experiments.

Yokosuka City in Kanagawa prefecture is now using AI chatbot ChatGPT to assist with administrative tasks like recording and resuming meetings because of labor shortages.

” We deal with enormous amount of documents, and it takes a very long time and effort to create those documents,” says the city’s spokesperson Kohei Ota.

Thanks to ChatGPT,” we have calculated after our trial that we save 22,700 hours of work annually,” he adds.

At the national government’s Digital Agency, which was established in 2021 to overcome inefficiency in public administration, AI is also used to train its staff.

There are” so many things” we want to do, but our workforce has n’t been able to keep up,” says Masanori Kusunoki of the agency. He adds that the government is trying to “explore how we can use AI, and spread the information” to the private sector.

However, Mr. Kusunoki does n’t believe that there will be fewer jobs as a result of AI.

Japan embraces the potential of AI with less reluctance than other nations in a region where things change slowly.

Since it has looked into every possible way to deal with the double whammy of an ageing and shrinking population for more than a decade: from robots to women, the elderly, and foreign workers.

AI may improve the efficiency of the workforce, but it is not at all ready to take over from human workers.