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Japan also ranks 3rd (behind the USA & India, with larger populations) in ChatGPT usage: https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.c

Japan also ranks 3rd (behind the USA & India, with larger populations) in ChatGPT usage: https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ There's also been discussion of their government using ChatGPT to reduce red tape: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-18/japan-government-taps-chatgpt-to-cut-through-bureaucracy-deluge#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-18/japan-gov... It's cool to see Japan and Japanese culture taking techno-optimist stances on AI.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ChatGTP 3y ago
I strongly disagree. They need to actually address problems. Not throw tools at it. The problem Japan seems to have is they don’t understand AI and than they don’t understand software, which is they don’t understand a lot of modern tech. They’ll pay for this mistake just as they paid for being bad at software.
- yinser 3y ago
  [flagged]
Loocid 3y ago
Which I find bizarre given how backwards Japan is in the adoption of other technologies. Eg their continued reliance on paper records and fax machines.
- johnwalkr 3y ago
  Do you have concrete examples? I recently moved from Japan to Europe after 10 years in Japan and while some things seemed old-fashioned in Japan, things also change overnight there. During Covid most companies changed to digital signing. In Japan I often needed a paper from the city, but it was an easy-to-obtain printout I could get immediately from city hall or even from 7-11. I tend to require the same papers in Europe too, with the extra hassle of needing some from Japan (2-3 months) and some from Europe (2-3 days). Example 1: get ID card at the airport when you emigrate to japan. In Europe it takes 2-3 months. Example 2: getting a local driving license takes 1 day provided your country has a treaty with japan. In Europe it can take several months because you need to request criminal records from your previous countries I have yet to encounter a situation that requires a fax machine in either place.
  - Loocid 3y ago
    My personal experience has only been from the tourism side with one concrete example being digital payments outside of PayPay. It's much better post COVID but even on my most recent trip from a couple of months ago if you want pay by card, the vast majority of the time you're signing with pen and paper. Rarely did they offer pin or tap which is common elsewhere. Anecdotally I only know stories from people that I know personally that live there and through the internet. Eg PauloInTokyo does good "day in the life" videos. Off the top of my head I believe the Pachinko episode illustrates a variety of old school manual processes that have stuck around (pen and paper shift logs etc). I've also heard opening even a simple bank account is quite the pain.
    - fomine3 3y ago
      In my experience with Japan local IC/NFC credit card, I've never signed when I use CC in recent 5 years but PIN is sometimes needed. Do you use magnetic stripe CC?
      - Loocid 3y ago
        >Do you use magnetic stripe CC. All my cards have an IC, however they were Australian cards. Perhaps it's an additional step for foreign credit/debit cards?
        fomine3 3y ago
        I don't know much about CC, but possibly difference of PIN method can be a reason. Possibly like merchant only support offline PIN vs your card only support online PIN?
        johnwalkr 3y ago
        Must be a quirk for those cards in Japan. I've had no problems using my Canadian cards in Japan, and don't recall ever having to sign. In terms of banking and payments, it has improved a lot over the years: ATMs are mostly 24/7, or at least you can always find one, banks don't shut down over holiday weeks anymore (some do occasionally but it's a one-time thing for big upgrades for interoperability), and you can use credit cards and tap-to-pay almost everywhere. My only complaint is the sheer number of digital payment options. You end up with using at least 1-2 on top of your credit card because it's tied to some other service.
- rtpg 3y ago
  Perhaps places are multifaceted and not reducible to 2-bit facts like the usage of fax machines or lack of credit card adoption.
  - Loocid 3y ago
    Of course, I just find the the stereotype vs reality of Japan being a high tech wonderland interesting.
- Prickle 3y ago
  I would not say we are super reliant on paper/fax anymore. But, it is still quite common. I did receive a Fax at the office last week on Thursday. Oh, and some of our stuff uses Dialup, usually in relation to that older infrastructure. Got thrown for a loop this wednesday when ye good old Dialup (acoustic handshake) audio started screeching across the office. Did not realize we still used it at all!
  - EleanorKonik 3y ago
    I've sent faxes in America within the last 2 years; they're still a thing here too.
- NalNezumi 3y ago
  I've heard this FAX meme since like early 2000, but I have yet to encounter one in my 4 years living here, and most Japanese people I joke this too just gets as perplexed by the joke. I wonder, where do people find those FAX machine? Have I lived in a tech/startup bubble in Tokyo and missed it? I didn't even see it at the local Ward office in the suburb. Some stuff are still old-school (hanko etc) but it to me seem like the fax meme have outlived the reality. Last time I heard fax machine was a German exchange student in Tokyo, AFTER she returned to Germany and had to get some paperwork at the ward office, in Germany
  - pezezin 3y ago
    Have you seen the big printers at many konbinis? Those are also fax machines. I have only sent two faxes in my life, and both were after I moved to Japan. The first was right after I arrived, I ordered something from Amazon and I realized I had written my address wrong, when I tried to fix it my account to blocked, and to unblock it I had to send a hand-written fax with my name and address. The second time was when I got a letter from the Sapporo police telling me that I had lost my driving license there. Again, to recover it I had to send a hand-written fax explaining the situation, so they could prove my identity. How that is considered a secure procedure is beyond me, but such is Japan.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>It's cool to see Japan and Japanese culture taking techno-optimist stances on AI. Japan has always seen artificial intelligence and its integration into human society favorably. Look at Doraemon or any anime in the super robot genre.
- soraminazuki 3y ago
  Discussion in Japan is far more nuanced just like everywhere else. Misuse of technology is an often repeated theme in the Doraemon series, and robot animes often cover wars.
tkgally 3y ago
As I posted to another thread last week [1], I have been surprised by the quick rise in awareness and use of ChatGPT in Japan—despite its production of Japanese being not quite as good as that of English [2, 3]. Although I have seen discussions of AI safety and alignment issues in the Japanese press, those concerns seem less dominant than in discussions in English outside Japan. There also seems to be less focus on the possibility of people losing their jobs to AI. One reason may be the employment situation in Japan. For both legal and cultural reasons, it is difficult for companies here to lay off full-time employees. If advances in technology render some employees redundant, companies will try to retrain or reassign them rather than letting them go. (Freelancers are not protected, though, and I know some translators and illustrators worried about losing work to generative AI.) Also, there is currently a labor shortage here, partly for demographic reasons, and a lot of white-collar workers are perceived as not being as productive as they could be. Generative AI may be seen as a way to make the existing human workforce more productive. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36078823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36078823 [2] Yesterday, as a test, I had GPT-4 compose some business e-mails in both Japanese and English based on bullet points I provided to it in the respective languages. The English e-mails were, to my eye, perfect, while the Japanese ones sounded a bit awkward in places. [3] I live in Japan and read and speak both Japanese and English.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ChatGTP 3y ago

I strongly disagree. They need to actually address problems. Not throw tools at it. The problem Japan seems to have is they don’t understand AI and than they don’t understand software, which is they don’t understand a lot of modern tech. They’ll pay for this mistake just as they paid for being bad at software.

yinser 3y ago
[flagged]

Loocid 3y ago

Which I find bizarre given how backwards Japan is in the adoption of other technologies. Eg their continued reliance on paper records and fax machines.

johnwalkr 3y ago
Do you have concrete examples? I recently moved from Japan to Europe after 10 years in Japan and while some things seemed old-fashioned in Japan, things also change overnight there. During Covid most companies changed to digital signing. In Japan I often needed a paper from the city, but it was an easy-to-obtain printout I could get immediately from city hall or even from 7-11. I tend to require the same papers in Europe too, with the extra hassle of needing some from Japan (2-3 months) and some from Europe (2-3 days). Example 1: get ID card at the airport when you emigrate to japan. In Europe it takes 2-3 months. Example 2: getting a local driving license takes 1 day provided your country has a treaty with japan. In Europe it can take several months because you need to request criminal records from your previous countries I have yet to encounter a situation that requires a fax machine in either place.
- Loocid 3y ago
  My personal experience has only been from the tourism side with one concrete example being digital payments outside of PayPay. It's much better post COVID but even on my most recent trip from a couple of months ago if you want pay by card, the vast majority of the time you're signing with pen and paper. Rarely did they offer pin or tap which is common elsewhere. Anecdotally I only know stories from people that I know personally that live there and through the internet. Eg PauloInTokyo does good "day in the life" videos. Off the top of my head I believe the Pachinko episode illustrates a variety of old school manual processes that have stuck around (pen and paper shift logs etc). I've also heard opening even a simple bank account is quite the pain.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    In my experience with Japan local IC/NFC credit card, I've never signed when I use CC in recent 5 years but PIN is sometimes needed. Do you use magnetic stripe CC?
    - Loocid 3y ago
      >Do you use magnetic stripe CC. All my cards have an IC, however they were Australian cards. Perhaps it's an additional step for foreign credit/debit cards?
      - fomine3 3y ago
        I don't know much about CC, but possibly difference of PIN method can be a reason. Possibly like merchant only support offline PIN vs your card only support online PIN?
      - johnwalkr 3y ago
        Must be a quirk for those cards in Japan. I've had no problems using my Canadian cards in Japan, and don't recall ever having to sign. In terms of banking and payments, it has improved a lot over the years: ATMs are mostly 24/7, or at least you can always find one, banks don't shut down over holiday weeks anymore (some do occasionally but it's a one-time thing for big upgrades for interoperability), and you can use credit cards and tap-to-pay almost everywhere. My only complaint is the sheer number of digital payment options. You end up with using at least 1-2 on top of your credit card because it's tied to some other service.
rtpg 3y ago
Perhaps places are multifaceted and not reducible to 2-bit facts like the usage of fax machines or lack of credit card adoption.
- Loocid 3y ago
  Of course, I just find the the stereotype vs reality of Japan being a high tech wonderland interesting.
Prickle 3y ago
I would not say we are super reliant on paper/fax anymore. But, it is still quite common. I did receive a Fax at the office last week on Thursday. Oh, and some of our stuff uses Dialup, usually in relation to that older infrastructure. Got thrown for a loop this wednesday when ye good old Dialup (acoustic handshake) audio started screeching across the office. Did not realize we still used it at all!
- EleanorKonik 3y ago
  I've sent faxes in America within the last 2 years; they're still a thing here too.
NalNezumi 3y ago
I've heard this FAX meme since like early 2000, but I have yet to encounter one in my 4 years living here, and most Japanese people I joke this too just gets as perplexed by the joke. I wonder, where do people find those FAX machine? Have I lived in a tech/startup bubble in Tokyo and missed it? I didn't even see it at the local Ward office in the suburb. Some stuff are still old-school (hanko etc) but it to me seem like the fax meme have outlived the reality. Last time I heard fax machine was a German exchange student in Tokyo, AFTER she returned to Germany and had to get some paperwork at the ward office, in Germany
- pezezin 3y ago
  Have you seen the big printers at many konbinis? Those are also fax machines. I have only sent two faxes in my life, and both were after I moved to Japan. The first was right after I arrived, I ordered something from Amazon and I realized I had written my address wrong, when I tried to fix it my account to blocked, and to unblock it I had to send a hand-written fax with my name and address. The second time was when I got a letter from the Sapporo police telling me that I had lost my driving license there. Again, to recover it I had to send a hand-written fax explaining the situation, so they could prove my identity. How that is considered a secure procedure is beyond me, but such is Japan.

Dalewyn 3y ago

>It's cool to see Japan and Japanese culture taking techno-optimist stances on AI. Japan has always seen artificial intelligence and its integration into human society favorably. Look at Doraemon or any anime in the super robot genre.

soraminazuki 3y ago
Discussion in Japan is far more nuanced just like everywhere else. Misuse of technology is an often repeated theme in the Doraemon series, and robot animes often cover wars.

tkgally 3y ago

As I posted to another thread last week [1], I have been surprised by the quick rise in awareness and use of ChatGPT in Japan—despite its production of Japanese being not quite as good as that of English [2, 3]. Although I have seen discussions of AI safety and alignment issues in the Japanese press, those concerns seem less dominant than in discussions in English outside Japan. There also seems to be less focus on the possibility of people losing their jobs to AI. One reason may be the employment situation in Japan. For both legal and cultural reasons, it is difficult for companies here to lay off full-time employees. If advances in technology render some employees redundant, companies will try to retrain or reassign them rather than letting them go. (Freelancers are not protected, though, and I know some translators and illustrators worried about losing work to generative AI.) Also, there is currently a labor shortage here, partly for demographic reasons, and a lot of white-collar workers are perceived as not being as productive as they could be. Generative AI may be seen as a way to make the existing human workforce more productive. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36078823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36078823 [2] Yesterday, as a test, I had GPT-4 compose some business e-mails in both Japanese and English based on bullet points I provided to it in the respective languages. The English e-mails were, to my eye, perfect, while the Japanese ones sounded a bit awkward in places. [3] I live in Japan and read and speak both Japanese and English.