[Feature: Society Changed by Smartphones] Roundtable: The Future of Mobile Led by Users

Today, I would like to think with all of you about smartphones, which have become indispensable to everyone. When talking about smartphones, there are various perspectives to consider. One is generation—that is, at what timing did you first get a smartphone? There are also respective fields of expertise, and in some cases, a gender perspective might exist. Since users are diverse, I hope the conversation expands in various ways.

First, could you start by telling us how you have been involved with smartphones?

I have been involved in development since the days of mobile phones (keitai) before smartphones. A long time ago, around 1995 or 1996, a general manager of the camera business at Mitsubishi Electric said he wanted to sell a small camera. This wasn't an ordinary camera; it was actually an artificial retina camera capable of neural network computations, and I was consulted on how to sell it.

In '95 and '96, digital cameras were just starting to become popular, and mobile phones weren't that common yet. However, it was thought they would sell more and more in the future. So I suggested, "Why not sell it together with a mobile phone?" That worked out well, and it developed into the world's first camera-equipped mobile phone. That's how a camera happened to be attached to a mobile phone.

At that time, I heard that various carriers like Docomo said the same thing. Everyone said, "Is there any point in going out of your way to put a camera on a mobile phone when digital cameras already exist?" But a company called Tu-Ka decided to try putting one on anyway, and the camera phone was born. It was called the "Pochette," and it was the first in the world. That was in 1999.

Now, it has become natural for cameras to be on smartphones, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, smartphones have become a lifeline for some people. They have now become an essential part of daily life.

But personally, I actually dislike mobile phones and smartphones (laughs). Because they are small and you can't engage in creation. I do various programming on PCs, so smartphones are too small. They might be fine for playing around, though.

When you first tried to link a camera and a mobile phone, did you imagine photos flying across networks like they do now?

I wasn't thinking about anything like that. It was just a feeling that it might be good to attach a camera.

Soon after, apps appeared, and since it was a neural network, it became possible to calculate outlines and such immediately. So we were also the first in the world to do things like taking a photo and drawing a caricature like a manga. Actually, that was a byproduct created from the neural network.

I see. That's interesting. Now, Mr. Kodama, please.

My relationship with mobile phones and smartphones has become almost like my life itself, but I have been involved in mobile since before smartphones. In the mid-90s, when I was a high school student, Apple released the Newton MessagePad, the world's first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). Since I was a Mac enthusiast, I bought the Japanese localization kit and was convinced that this would definitely be the future.

It was around the time Windows 95 came out, but I was able to do mobile internet by connecting to a gray ISDN public phone. I think I was probably the only high school student in Japan who had a Newton, so I feel like I was the first mobile internet user (laughs).

Then I entered SFC, and in 2003, when I entered graduate school and thought about what to research, what caught my eye was the internet penetration rate in Japan. At the time, the internet penetration rate for PCs was about 50-60%, but the penetration rate for the internet itself was nearly 90%. The reason was mobile phones. i-mode had come out, and a significant number of Japanese people were connecting to the internet thanks to mobile phones. Knowing that, I thought mobile was important, and I ended up focusing my research on mobile from my master's through my doctorate.

So that's how it happened.

In 2008, when I withdrew from the Doctoral Programs after completing the credits, the iPhone was released in Japan. The impact of the iPhone was so great that I felt it was no longer the time to be doing research, so I joined a company called "Tonchidot" to make apps. This was the company that created Sekai Camera, the first AR (Augmented Reality) app for smartphones.

To make it more widely used, I created a social app where people could collect and share local information. This went well and was downloaded by about 800,000 people. After that, I wanted to make the smartphones themselves rather than just apps, so I went to a company called FreeBit, founded by Hiroki Ishida, a member of the first graduating class of SFC.

There, in 2012-13, I created an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). An MVNO is a business model where you lease the communication infrastructure owned by carriers like Docomo to create customized services, but what made us unique was that we also created the devices and the services. This was initially called FreeBit Mobile, but it is now sold at Docomo shops under the name Tone Mobile as an "Economy MVNO."

After that, I started my own consulting firm and consulted for mobile, AR, and robot companies, but since 2016, I have been a product manager at an IT company.

Also, when the COVID pandemic started and a contact tracing app using Bluetooth was released and used in Singapore, I wanted to make one in Japan too. I collaborated with an open-source group called "Covid 19Radar" to handle the UI and design, which was then adopted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and became what is now COCOA.

This was difficult due to various bugs and issues, but what I did with Sekai Camera and COCOA is actually quite connected. While mobile is a window to the internet, I think it's even more significant that it functions as a sensing device that captures environmental information.

Now, how about you, Ms. Shirato?

In terms of generations, the period from 2001 to 2003 corresponds to when I was a high school student. I was a textbook high school girl, with dyed brown hair and loose socks, and stuffed animals attached to my mobile phone (laughs). I'm very happy to hear Professor Muto's story today about being the first in the world to put a camera on a mobile phone.

I was lucky enough to get into SFC, but at the time of enrollment, I didn't understand the internet or computers at all. It started with reading emails on UNIX and wondering what Emacs was. Since Professor Kenji Kobiyama's research group was focusing on mobile phones, I spent some time there, which was my first involvement in mobile phone research. I collected brochures from Docomo, KDDI, and others to study how catchphrases transitioned, and I was interested in looking at the world through a sociological approach.

From there, I stayed with Professor Kenji Kumasaka until I earned my doctorate. When I entered the Doctoral Programs in 2009 was probably the year I got my first iPhone. In the Kumasaka Lab, we used social media data for social surveys, targeting the SNS mixi. We viewed social media as a social survey where users automatically created items themselves and continued to answer them. While working on that, the iPhone appeared, and I had the impression that the data sent by ordinary people suddenly became diverse. Until then it was just text, but around this time, things like location information and photos were added, and sharing with others really began to flourish.

At that time in the lab, we were playing with Sekai Camera, which Mr. Kodama mentioned earlier, and I remember thinking that the future had truly arrived. Back then, Sekai Camera was too far ahead of its time, and there was interesting information only in places like SFC, but now AR apps are accepted in the world as a matter of course. Since my specialty is research on using social media for social surveys, I am interested in the smartphone as an interface.

Everyone has a different way of putting it, but I think "sharing" is one of the themes. As Ms. Shirato said, not just text, but various things like video and location information are overflowing into cyberspace and being shared.

As Mr. Muto said at the beginning, there are now many people whose lives would be disrupted without a smartphone. However, there are also people who don't have them or don't use them. While the sharing of information is accelerating, I also think that information is being concentrated somewhere, and "connections" that cannot exist without a smartphone are being born.

In 2003, I wrote a book called "Let's Investigate the Future of Mobile Phones" for Iwanami Junior Shinsho. I wrote about how mobile phones would become these kinds of devices and be able to do these kinds of things, and actually, all of that has been realized now.

Technological innovation is necessary for change to occur in society, but in reality, innovation happened more than imagined and permeated society at an incredible speed. If something is perceived as "interesting," it permeates society in no time.

When there is a social transformation that far exceeds the imagination of engineers, no one can stop it anymore. I think the development of social rules and laws is necessary to manage that well, but because technological development is so fast and emerges as a social phenomenon, it feels like the development of laws and rules is lagging behind.

Especially when looking at sports competitions, things judged by humans are subject to bias. From the perspective of an AI expert like me, I think it can be judged surprisingly easily.

Since AI will be integrated into smartphones from now on, we must decide on rules to clearly identify which parts humans should be involved in and where AI should or should not act. From my perspective, I wonder what the social science people are doing.

I see. Mr. Kodama, is there anything that changed dramatically with smartphones or anything that left an impression on you?

I used to bring a laptop to high school classes. I think I was consciously trying to digitize my life with a mobile personal computer even back then. It was possible to email on mobile, and for digital music, I could rip CDs on a Mac and turn them into movie files to listen to, so I thought this would become the norm in the future.

I thought it was significant that access to information in daily life became much easier. Also, it became clear that society would become one where communication is conducted through personal devices, and I felt that as time passed, it would become more and more widespread.

I have a younger brother who is more of a late majority type, but when he started using an iPhone, I felt that the spread had accelerated, thinking, "Oh, it's reached this far," and I felt that without that medium, one would lose touch with society.

Mr. Kodama, you are an early adopter. From that standpoint, I imagine you felt that the world hadn't caught up yet, but where does that sense of dissatisfaction lead?

At first, it was school. Since I was a teenager, I wondered why we were still using tools like chalk and blackboards. Even recently, I feel it in various administrative procedures. For example, when my child was born and I had to handle nursery school procedures and communication. It's still on paper, communicating by writing everything by hand, like "today they ate rice, potatoes, and cucumbers."

In those moments, I think, "Couldn't you just attach a camera and be done with it?" Even though we've become such a smartphone-based society, I feel there are still many things that can be done in various fields.

In the 20th century, engineers and scientists were the ones leading, but as in the current discussion, it has clearly become user-led. Users lead, and social phenomena occur by supplying technology to meet that.

In a world where user-led development is already evident, I feel the biggest challenge is how society can guide things in an interesting and positive direction.

How about you, Ms. Shirato?

I think it relates to being user-led, but "always-on" connectivity has increased significantly. It's often said that middle and high school students keep LINE connected while studying for exams to maintain a sense of tension or to encourage each other. Or, it's well known that people keep Discord connected while gaming; these are things possible because smartphones have become computerized and are always connected.

It is said that when Bell first invented the telephone, the fact that the voice of someone far away could be heard at one's ear was very important. That created an effect called "psychological proximity," where someone feels psychologically close despite being far away. Applying this to today's society, I believe always-on connectivity is creating "psychological hangouts."

As Professor Muto said, such cultures are born through user leadership, which in turn gives birth to different technologies. I feel the cycle in which we adapt to that is turning very quickly.

That's an important point. The other day, I told an executive at NTT that Japan's mobile phone pricing structure is no good. In Europe, prices are determined by access speed. They don't quibble over how many gigabytes you used. Therefore, if being always connected is the norm, it's economically better to set the pricing structure based solely on access speed. Japan is still lagging behind in that regard.

Operators also spend a lot of time and money calculating charges. To make everyone happy in the future, we just need to remove the current wasteful parts. Then you can have low rates no matter how much you use in a month. When I said we need to move to such a society quickly, they all had no comment (laughs).

Since I was running an MVNO, that was exactly my world. In the end, since MVNO operators like us had to be charged based on how much of Docomo's bandwidth we used, our job was essentially to manage that packet control in detail.

Hearing Professor Muto's talk made me think that while the good thing about the internet is supposed to be the centralization of many networks, when it comes to mobile networks, the "last mile" is held by a few very monopolistic operators, the mobile carriers. In thinking about the state of mobile, the fact that you cannot connect to the internet without going through a mobile carrier's network is a major factor.

Every piece of data has no choice but to use the NTT "pipes" laid across Japan. Since everyone is being danced around on top of this, I think we should send a message to properly make the rates flat-rate.

What I found interesting about always-on connectivity becoming the norm is that people have developed an image of "not waiting" for things. Because you are always on (standby), you can react immediately at any time. However, on the other hand, one could also think that we are actually always waiting.

For example, a common story is that when we were students, we didn't have mobile phones, so when meeting up, we had no choice but to just wait. But today's students only decide something like "Shibuya at what time," and they are just in Shibuya around that time and get caught there. So they say "meeting up has disappeared."

However, if you think about it, always-on connectivity means you have to be waiting at all times, so you could also think that waiting time might actually be increasing. Is there anything that has changed due to always-on connectivity?

I strongly feel that there are "visible people" and "invisible people" on the screen. For example, when I have a little free time in town and wonder who to call out to, I open SNS, and the person I call out to is surely someone who is posting something, someone on the timeline. In that sense, always-on connectivity may have made it possible to wait for unspecified others.

Also, another thing I feel is the existence of people who don't take any action on SNS. For example, on Facebook, people who appear on your timeline are recognized as friends, but there is a possibility that people who don't post for a long time will eventually cease to exist in your mind.

In addition, the fact that a certain person is always being called out to by someone becomes visible within the scope of public sharing, making it visible that "that person is popular" or "active." I think preferential selection, like the rich getting richer, has become very easy to see in human relationships.

While "waiting" might be good for "visible people," I feel it might be quite difficult for "invisible people" or people who find it hard to post.

To put it bluntly, is it like friends seem to be increasing but aren't actually increasing that much?

That might be it. Also, interaction has become limited to the range visible on the smartphone screen. It might be fine if everyone were visible there, but what happens to the people who have become invisible?

You mentioned the outside of the smartphone earlier, and I think not posting can lead to moving further and further away from human networks.

On the other hand, I think there are things hindering digitization. I just read a news article saying that the computers introduced under the Ministry of Education's GIGA School Program are not being used very actively. One of the major reasons given is that if students search things on their own during class, it disrupts the progress of the lesson.

That's wrong. It's the exact opposite. In terms of being a society that utilizes digital, Japan is now miserably at the bottom among OECD countries. We used to be at the top.

I realized this after I started receiving my pension, but in the US, a pension application is a one-page document where you just write your name and Social Security number in one place. With that, all the documents are created automatically. In Japan, you write and submit a dozen or so pages, and it comes back by mail saying to rewrite this part. This takes a month. Moreover, even though it's a government document, you have to submit things like a family register. I wonder what is going on.

There are some things that are hard to believe. There are also stories that the registration of COVID-positive cases cannot keep up systematically. HER-SYS, the positive case registration management system, and COCOA are linked, but for HER-SYS registration, communication from medical institutions to health centers is done by fax, so it's said that the health centers' response can't keep up at all. This is having a very large impact on the pandemic response.

If a solid digital mechanism were built in the backend, smartphones would be used effectively and become very beneficial to society, but the use of My Number itself is fragmented across ministries and not seamlessly connected horizontally.

In the US, everything is connected horizontally with the Social Security number. This is a big difference, and it is properly returned to society and used effectively. It's a shame that today's Japan has become a society where such common-sense talk doesn't apply. I don't feel that digital is being skillfully linked with society and smartphones are being well connected.

On the other hand, the recently released vaccination record app is very well made, it's being updated frequently, and I think they are working hard on it. The backend information updates are also very fast, so there are at least some bright movements like that appearing in Japan.

Japan used to be ahead in various technological developments in the mobile field. Things like Osaifu-Keitai (mobile wallet) were implemented in society, and we were ahead. Things like "Sha-mail" (photo mail) were the same.

I think we were very advanced in the world.

But right around the time smartphones appeared, we lost hegemony, and at that timing, the digitization of society also stopped progressing. I feel that since the shift to smartphones, things in Japan have unfortunately gone in a negative direction.

It's true that when smartphones came out, we couldn't skillfully ride the two major forces of iPhone and Android. Engineers had strange fixations, and all manufacturers missed the boat. Even though Japan was originally good at imitation, it feels like they had a strange pride. After all, Android and iPhone weren't made in Japan to begin with, right?

I think there are various reasons, but Android is Linux, and iOS also uses a kernel (the core program of an OS) derived from BSD Unix. When those OSs came in, I think we couldn't beat the depth of the workstation or PC software industries.

Osaifu-Keitai is a good example. The FeliCa ID standard didn't become a global standard, so it took a long time before the iPhone supported FeliCa.

I think the infrastructure previously built in Japan and the smartphone feature set didn't match, so they weren't utilized effectively.

I feel that the momentum to ride on new, good technologies has weakened due to strange fixations. In the first place, we used to make quite a few PCs in Japan, but in the end, we left all the design to places like Taiwan, and the people who could design disappeared. It feels like "Where did the Japan of technology go?" After all, you must not give away the main house entirely. You need the minimum technology that you should hold yourself.

However, at the same time, users are maturing at a tremendous pace, aren't they?

Users are already at the global cutting edge and are leading the way.

New ways of using technology often emerge from Japan, don't they?

In the first place, the company that supplied the first mobile phones to Bell was a Japanese company called Toyo Communication Equipment. They were the first to supply PHS to Bell. I feel that the number of places possessing such core technology is steadily decreasing compared to the past.

Users have matured, and even at universities, there are areas where the faculty side can't quite keep up with the behavior of the students.

Recently, there was an international graduate student who was always looking at her smartphone while listening to me, so I thought she wasn't paying attention. But she was actually using machine translation. She was typing while I spoke in Japanese, trying her best to keep up with the class. The device was right there in her hand, but my imagination hadn't stretched that far.

It's the same as the GIGA School discussion; one of the attractions of a smartphone is that because it's in your hand, you can search for things on the spot or access the outside world, right?

The theme of my doctoral thesis raised the issue of being disconnected from the 'here and now' when using digital devices. Even though smartphones have become this ubiquitous, I feel that understanding of that issue hasn't really improved.

I think it used to be said that mobile phones would reduce family communication.

But as Professor Muto mentioned at the beginning, due to the social situation under COVID-19, the meaning of the smartphone suddenly shifted to being a communication device that literally connects lives. I have the impression that society changed overnight. It's as if mature users completely flipped their perspective.

As Ms. Shirato mentioned, I feel the proportion of human relationships that don't involve smartphones or similar devices is decreasing. It's as if it's hard to maintain relationships without going through them.

At our house, we used to call the kids for dinner by voice, but now we just send a LINE message saying "Food" (laughs). I intentionally make the notification bell go 'ring-ring-ring'.

I often hear stories about married couples who are in the same house but converse via LINE.

I also often hear about people having a fight and then making up over LINE. They apologize via smartphone instead of apologizing directly face-to-face.

Regarding messenger functions, the iPhone has its own messaging system called iMessage, and I hear there's something called the "green bubble problem" in the US when doing group chats.

If you join with an Android, your display becomes a green bubble. So, discrimination occurs within the group chat, like "I'm blue, you're green." Apparently, on dating apps, people with green bubbles have a lower probability of landing a date (laughs).

Isn't that just Apple's strategy?

That's what people say. That they are discriminating intentionally. So the OS has already become an identity.

Depending on the app, some only support one or the other at the initial release, so that creates a divide as well.

Generations older than us talk in the context of how communication outside of smartphones has decreased, but for the younger generation, they don't even seem to have the sense that it has decreased. On the other hand, I think they are looking very closely at differences in the finer details of communication on smartphones.

The other day in class, I asked about songs that represent the current era and media situation, and I gathered many lyrics like "LINE read receipts" or "a 140-character cesspool." I think expressions that used to be about waiting for a letter or a phone call have been replaced, but it's not just that the media has changed; they are feeling emotion in very minute details.

It's not that handwritten letters or voice calls have warmth while digital media doesn't. Digital media is also being received as something with a lot of texture as communication.

When it gets even more advanced, there are things like "I saw it, but I'm making it so the 'read' status doesn't show."

Like being considerate and intentionally reading it later. In other words, if the 'read' status appears, people will ask why there's no reply. In that sense, everyone is being very careful.

What are your thoughts on what lies beyond the smartphone?

Recently, the VR metaverse has become popular. When you experiment with it, there are quite a few social services. The other day, a colleague on the US West Coast was retiring, so we held a farewell party in VR.

It was very interesting; eye contact and gestures are becoming quite possible. It's interesting to see a bit of a backswing from the digital extreme of things like message read receipts, toward an embodied experience returning.

I was able to shake hands. When I tried to hug, it blacked out because it was deemed inappropriate due to social distancing. Even in VR, there's social distancing (laughs).

It's fascinating that these kinds of interactions are emerging. Since Meta headsets have sold about 10 million units worldwide now, I think there are such new possibilities when talking about what comes after the smartphone.

We actually research VR and make it usable in actual industry. For example, when building or maintaining a structure, or making an estimate, there are systems that allow us to show customers as if they are really there in VR.

We can now show things so complex that you can't tell if it's reality or VR. Computation power is still insufficient to show things in 3D space, but as you said, we are clearly approaching that era, and I think it will take a form where users lead and the technology side follows the cutting-edge users.

Regarding something I made recently, an AI car tachometer. I expect this will eventually be integrated into smartphones. To give you an idea of how amazing it is, it can distinguish between good and bad driving with over 99.99% accuracy. By incorporating AI, I think accident-free driving linked with smartphones will become quite realistic.

Speaking of "society changed by smartphones," IoT applications connecting various sensing devices and AI will likely increase in Japan, but the fact that Meta headsets can now be sold at a unit price of around 30,000 yen is a big deal.

In other words, the SoCs (chips), semiconductors, and other sensing devices incorporated into smartphones have become very cheap. When I was doing research, I used to order magnetic compass sensors from the US that cost about 200,000 yen and were used for ship navigation.

Now they're only a few hundred yen.

Now all of those are inside smartphones. Because of that, the prices of computer hardware and sensors have dropped dramatically, making them applicable to many other devices. I think the impact that has had on industry is very large.

One reason sensing devices became cheaper is the spread of drones. Those are clusters of sensors, and the rapid spread of drones caused chip prices to drop dramatically, which then got put into smartphones and became even cheaper. There is a very high possibility that devices like smartphones that go even further will keep emerging by merging with AI.

If you look at Apple's developer conferences, about a third of the sessions are AI-related. So, while people don't think of smartphones as AI, the contents are becoming close to AI.

That's right. Smartphones themselves are being replaced by AI more and more. We can now predict how that will involve society. I think those AI systems will develop even further through the younger generation of users who are at the forefront.

For example, AI can judge human emotions that don't often come to the surface just by looking at facial features. If we equip it with such super-skills, it's becoming possible to read subtle emotions. Whether that's good or bad for society is another matter, and I think some level of rules will be necessary.

The neural network technology that Professor Muto has worked on has seen incredible progress over the last 10 years. I feel that the performance of speech recognition by the team from Microsoft and the University of Toronto in 2012 exceeding that of humans was a watershed moment.

Until then, humans had to adapt to the convenience of computers. However, because AI has become so good and sensing devices represented by smartphones have spread into our living environments, computers have become able to understand human intentions quite accurately. This is a very big change.

Current smartphone touch panel technology is also an entry point, and such models will increasingly be applied to different forms of sensing and signals. For example, the fact that voice recognition has come into use is one such case.

Also, like AR visual recognition, it's becoming possible to recognize things by interpreting the world through human modalities plus alpha. So, machines might be better at reading subtle changes in facial expressions that humans don't notice.

My child is 3 years old now. He always wants to watch YouTube, but since I've made all the devices in the house voice-assistant compatible, he operates them by voice rather than touching the touch panel. Turning on lights, asking the time. He debuted with voice assistants before tablets or smartphones—he's a voice assistant native, or an AI native.

We've entered the era of Star Trek (laughs). Even if you don't know where the smartphone body is, the AI interacts for you.

Did he learn that by watching what Dad and Mom do?

He lives with it, so he just learns it naturally. So even in places without a voice assistant, he'll say the assistant's name and be like, "Oh, you're not here?" (laughs).

We have a Google Home at our house too. When I went to a friend's house with my daughter and they had a Google Home, she said, "Mr. Google is at this house too." I thought, she's already living in that kind of future.

New applications will probably emerge from that. Like, "Dad, are you still touching things? That's so uncool" (laughs).

I think everyone has realized over the past two years of COVID life that even though it's a mobile device, we mainly use smartphones inside the house. With remote work, even in a not-so-spacious house, people have become more conscious of moving around within the home, and it feels like the way we interact with devices has changed.

Just one thing to brag about: our house was the first in Japan to install Wi-Fi. That was in 1992. It was featured in the Yomiuri Shimbun as a family of the future. No one in Japan knew about Wi-Fi yet. I connected Israeli Wi-Fi and American Wi-Fi to create a Wi-Fi environment in the house.

And look at this development 30 years later. Wi-Fi is now taken for granted, but this change is amazing. The speed of technology diffusion is incredibly fast.

I entered SFC in '99, and it felt like all the Wi-Fi was set up shortly after I entered. When we were there, I feel SFC was able to differentiate itself from other campuses just by having always-on high-speed wireless internet. I'm a bit curious if that kind of differentiation exists now.

Kodama-san's question is hard to answer, but it's certainly a very important point. Universities can be slow-footed when it comes to various facilities.

Obsolescence (commoditization) is very fast now compared to the past. Nothing lasts 10 years; things are moving at a speed where you have to replace them in about 5 years.

That's true in terms of technical infrastructure. From a different angle, there's the idea of a special zone for rules. Around the time I graduated, I told Professor Kokuryo to make SFC a campus where personal data could be collected freely through sensing. If everyone who enters SFC signs a waiver, and faculty and students all conduct research with free access to personal data, I think we could do research that is highly differentiated.

But in Japan, people immediately say it's personal information and legally impossible. Even if you explain "that's not what I mean," government officials don't understand.

That is a very large inhibitor of innovation. COCOA was exactly like that; at the legal level, it was decided that location information cannot be taken from the network-side infrastructure under the current legal system. That's actually influenced by the design of Apple and Google too; they have a policy where apps cannot be provided unless consent is obtained at every step when they take information.

Even for taking one piece of information, rules aren't established, and Japan in particular is in a state of confusion. I hope they establish those things quickly and make this an easy-to-use and safe country.

That's the "Policy and Media" way of thinking, isn't it?

Right now, Toyota is building a city called Woven City at the foot of Mt. Fuji. Smart city concepts, especially in Japan, take a lot of time and effort to negotiate with the administration, so Toyota is taking the form of building a city on private land as an experimental field and experimenting there.

So I feel that experimental sites are important. I want SFC to be the foremost place like that.

Movement is a bit slow right now, but there's no doubt that SFC is a place for various experiments. Flying drones, conducting autonomous driving experiments. While it may not be sufficient, the spirit of experimenting every day is alive.

I also wish we could collect more data at school. The maturity of users is also reflected in the aspect of individuals existing as multiple personas within a smartphone.

The author Keiichiro Hirano called this "dividuals" (bun-jin). For example, I think there could be a compromise where everything within SFC is processed by login name and location information is known, but that's just one "dividual." It feels rather unnatural for that to be integrated into a single individual.

However, you can't draw a line unless you make everything open once. If you do it bit by bit saying "maybe this much is okay," you'll never know where the appropriate border is. You have to make everything okay once, and then remove things that are clearly problematic.

Speaking of COVID, the US made everything 100% open so that anyone can access all data, but not only Japan, even European countries are actually not like that. They call it open data, but in reality, only specific people can access it.

Only the US makes it completely publicly open so that anyone can handle data as they please. There's a big difference there; it's dynamic, and I feel the US has that kind of power. Good ideas don't necessarily come from experts. I very much understand Kodama-san's point about providing a place where things can be used freely.

Returning to the topic of mobile, I would like to point out that in terms of device development, the influence of carriers was incredibly strong. Since things were made for i-mode or i-appli according to their specifications, the technical discretion held by device manufacturers was small.

This was true not only in Japan but globally as well, but one of the amazing things about the iPhone was that it reversed that power dynamic. Instead of the carrier saying "Please make this," it was "We made an amazing device, so we'll let you connect it to your network."

Indeed, there is a deep-rooted, strange master-servant relationship, especially in Japan. But if you make something as good as Apple did, you should be able to tell the operators to listen to you. Whether Japanese manufacturers can overcome that will lead to future technological innovation. Your point hits right at the core of the issue.

In a sense, the smartphone has become a symbol of that.

Exactly. We often talk about breakthroughs, but if you create something amazing, the master-servant relationship changes.

In the first place, autonomous decentralized cooperation was important for Internet innovation. However, when it comes to mobile and Web 2.0, the architecture tends to move toward a centralized direction.

Kato-san, if SFC were to raise a flag and do something now, wouldn't it be technologies like virtual money or crypto money using smartphones? Not much research on that has come out of SFC yet, but it's a very effective research area and I feel it would be excellent as content to put out there.

Please do create SFC Money. Just make it so that only SFC Money is accepted within SFC.

I agree. As a keyword for today, I think there was a consistent theme of being user-driven. Technology is advancing, of course, but it seems the users are moving further and further ahead. While there are issues of law, politics, and culture, one thing that can be said for sure is that smartphones have become something we can no longer live without.

We have started living in a way where we always keep a smart device like a smartphone on our person. Various sensors are mounted there, and data that used to be difficult to collect is being generated constantly.

There are certainly business challenges and excitement in bundling that data to make it usable, and when you consider that one in two humans is exchanging data in a state of constant connection, I thought that the worldview itself will surely change.

Also, looking at it as a university faculty member, I feel that universities are slow to move. When we consider that students, who are users at the cutting edge, are coming to the university, I felt that the university must prepare various aspects and properly appeal its own attractiveness. Thank you very much for the diverse discussion today.