Yokosuka, a city located south of Tokyo, has recently started a trial use of artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT across all of its offices. The city officials hope that ChatGPT will improve the efficiency of its operations. In the one-month trial, Yokosuka will use ChatGPT to make bulletins, summarize records of meetings, edit documents for typographical errors, solicit proposals for new projects, and gain advice for its policies. Chatbots are software applications trained using massive amounts of data from the internet, enabling them to process and simulate human-like conversations with users. The generative AI will only use non-confidential data entered by the city officials, and confidential data will be excluded. City officials will enter questions or instructions in LoGoChat, a chat tool already introduced for local governments and connected with ChatGPT for the trial.   Mayor Katsuaki Kamiji believes that ChatGPT is a tool that the municipal government can use to he...

Japan has been at the forefront of robotics research and development for decades, and one of the areas where it has sought to apply this technology is in elder care. The country has a rapidly aging population, with over a quarter of its citizens over the age of 65. The hope was that robots could help provide care for this growing demographic and alleviate the burden on human caregivers. However, Japan’s long experiment in automating elder care has not been as successful as many had hoped, and the failure of projects like Robear illustrate some of the challenges that still need to be overcome. Robear is a robot developed by the RIKEN-SRK Collaboration Center for Human-Interactive Robot Research in Japan. It was designed to be a friendly and versatile robot that could assist in the care of elderly and disabled people. Its appearance was inspired by a bear, with a round body and cuddly features that were meant to put patients at ease. However, despite its cute appearance, Robear has not b...