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

Today, I would like to think with all of you about the smartphone, which has become something no one can let go of. When talking about smartphones, they can be discussed from various perspectives. One is generation—that is, at what timing did you get a smartphone? There are also respective fields of expertise, and in some cases, a gender perspective as well. 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, the head of the camera business division at Mitsubishi Electric said they wanted to sell a small camera. This wasn't an ordinary camera; it was actually an artificial retina camera capable of neural network calculations, 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 evolved 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 the same thing was said by various carriers like Docomo. 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 a matter of course 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 indispensable part of daily life.

But personally, I actually dislike mobile phones and smartphones (laughs). Because they are small and you can't create with them. I do various programming on a PC, 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 if we attached 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 born 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 with mobile technology since before smartphones. In the mid-90s, when I was a high school student, Apple released the world's first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) called the Newton MessagePad. I was a Mac enthusiast, so 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 was in graduate school and thinking about a research theme, 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. At the time, i-mode had been released, 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 to my doctorate.

So that's how it happened.

In 2008, when I withdrew from the doctoral program after completing the coursework, 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 after making 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 company and consulted for mobile, AR, and robot companies, but since 2016, I have been a product manager for an IT company.

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

This was difficult due to various bugs and issues, but what I did with Sekai Camera and COCOA is actually quite connected. Mobile is a window to the internet, but more than that, I think it's 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 stereotypical high school girl, with dyed brown hair and loose socks, and I had 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 when I entered, I didn't understand the internet or computers at all. It started with reading emails on UNIX and wondering what Emacs was. I heard that Professor Kenji Kobiyama's research group was focusing on mobile phones, so getting involved there was the beginning of my 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 was under Professor Kenji Kumasaka until I got 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 things like location information and photos being attached and shared with people really blossomed around this time.

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 early, and there was only interesting information 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 as a social survey, 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 the net space and being shared.

As Mr. Muto said at the beginning, there are now many people whose lives would be disrupted without a smartphone. But 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 in certain places, creating "connections" that cannot exist without a smartphone.

In 2003, I wrote a book for Iwanami Junior Shinsho called "Let's Investigate the Future of Mobile Phones." 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 beyond imagination and permeated society at an incredible speed. If something is thought to be "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 technology develops so fast and emerges as a social phenomenon, it feels like the development of laws and rules is lagging behind.

Especially when watching sports competitions, things judged by humans are subject to bias. From the perspective of an AI expert like me, I think it's surprisingly easy to judge them.

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

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

I used to bring a laptop to high school classes. I think I was consciously trying to digitalize 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 it would become more and more widespread as time went on.

I have a younger brother who is more of a late majority, but when he started using things like the iPhone, I felt that the spread had accelerated, thinking, "Oh, it's reached this far," and I felt that without that medium, it would become impossible to have a point of contact with society.

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

At first, it was school. Since I was a teenager, I wondered why they 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 do nursery school procedures and communication with the school. It's still on paper, and I have to communicate by writing everything by hand, like "today they ate rice, potatoes, and cucumbers."

At times like that, I think, wouldn't it be enough if they just attached a camera? Even though we've become such a smartphone society, I feel like there are still various areas where more can be done.

In the 20th century, engineers and scientists were the ones leading, but as in the story just now, it has clearly become user-led. Users lead, and by supplying technology to that, social phenomena are occurring.

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

Ms. Shirato, what do you think?

I think it relates to being user-led, but constant connection 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 they keep Discord connected while gaming, but these are things that can be done because smartphones have become computerized and are constantly connected.

When Bell first invented the telephone, it's said that being able to hear the voice of someone far away at your ear was very important. That created an effect called "psychological proximity," where someone is psychologically close despite being far away. Comparing this to today's society, I think constant connection is creating a "psychological hangout."

As Professor Muto said, such cultures are born through user leadership, which in turn gives birth to different technologies. I feel the cycle of us adapting 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 talk about petty things like how many gigabytes you used. Therefore, if constant connection is the norm, it's economically better to set the pricing structure based only 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 quickly move toward such a society, everyone on the other side had no comment (laughs).

Since I was doing an MVNO, that was exactly my world. In the end, MVNO operators like us had to be billed based on how much of Docomo's bandwidth was used, so doing detailed packet control became like our job.

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, I think it's a big deal that you can't connect to the internet without going through a network of a mobile carrier.

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

What I found interesting about constant connection becoming the norm is that I've started to have an image of "not waiting" for various things. Because you're always on (standby), you can react immediately at any time. However, on the other hand, you could also think that you're actually always waiting.

For example, a common story is that when we were students, we had no mobile phones, so we had no choice but to just wait at a meeting spot. But today's students only decide something like "Shibuya at what time," and they're just in Shibuya around that time and get caught there. So they say "meeting up has disappeared."

However, if you think about it, constant connection means you always have to be waiting, so you could also think that waiting time might actually be increasing. Is there anything that has changed due to constant connection?

I strongly feel that there are "visible people" and "invisible people" on the screen. For example, when you have a little free time in town and wonder who to call, you open SNS, and the person you call is surely someone who is posting something, someone on the timeline. In that sense, constant connection 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 people who don't post for a long time might eventually cease to exist in your mind.

In addition, it's visible within the scope of disclosure that a certain person is always being called by someone, making it visible that that person is popular or active. I think preferential selection, like the rich getting richer, has become very visible in human relationships.

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

To put it bluntly, it's like friends seem to be increasing but they're not really increasing that much.

That might be true. 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?

As you mentioned the outside of the smartphone earlier, 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 digitalization. I just read an article in the news saying that the computers introduced under the Ministry of Education's GIGA School Program are not being used very actively. One of the big reasons is that if students search 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 technology, Japan is now miserably at the bottom among OECD countries. We used to be at the top. The government itself is only now creating a Digital Agency; it's already way behind.

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 a dozen or so pages and submit them, and they come 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's going on.

There are some things that are hard to believe. There's also the story that the registration of COVID-positive cases can't keep up systematically. The positive case registration management system called HER-SYS 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 can't keep up at all. This is having a very large impact on the pandemic response.

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

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

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

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.

It was right around the time smartphones appeared that we could no longer take the hegemony, and at that timing, the digitalization of society also stopped progressing. I feel that since the shift to smartphones, Japan has unfortunately gone in a negative direction.

Certainly, when smartphones came out, we couldn't successfully ride the two major forces of iPhone and Android. Engineers had strange fixations, and all manufacturers missed the boat. Japan was originally good at imitating, but it feels like they had a strange pride. After all, Android and iPhone weren't made in Japan in the first place.

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 compete with the depth of the software industry for workstations and PCs.

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

I think the infrastructure that had been built in Japan until then didn't match the feature set of smartphones, so it wasn't utilized effectively.

I feel that due to strange fixations, the momentum to ride on new, good technologies has weakened. Originally, Japan used to manufacture a lot of PCs, but eventually, we left all the design to places like Taiwan, and the people who could design them disappeared. It feels like the 'Technological Japan' of the past has gone somewhere. We really shouldn't give away the main house entirely. We need to maintain at least the minimum level of technology ourselves.

But 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 things 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 holding truly core technologies is steadily decreasing compared to the past.

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

The other day, a graduate international student 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 was speaking in Japanese, trying her best to keep up with the class. The device was right there in her hand, but my imagination didn't stretch that far.

It's the same as the GIGA School story; one of the attractions of a smartphone should be the ability to search or access the outside world right then and there because it's in your hand.

The theme of my doctoral thesis raised the issue of being disconnected from the 'here and now' while 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 said 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 in an instant. 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.

In our house, we used to call the kids for dinner with our voices, but now we just send a LINE message saying 'Food' (laughs). I purposely make the notification ring loudly.

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

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

Speaking of messenger functions, the iPhone has its own messaging system called iMessage, and in the US, there's apparently something called the 'green bubble problem' when doing group chats.

If you join from an Android, the 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 iPhone'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 have the sense that it has decreased. On the other hand, I think they are looking very closely at the finer differences in communication on smartphones.

The other day in class, I asked about songs that represent the current era and media situation, and I got many lyrics like 'LINE read receipts' or 'a 140-character cesspool.' 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 seem to feel emotion in very minute details.

It's not that handwritten letters or phone calls where you hear a voice have warmth while digital media doesn't. It seems they perceive digital communication as something with a lot of texture as well.

When it gets even more advanced, there are things like 'I looked at it but I'm making sure the read receipt doesn't show up,' right?

Like being considerate and purposely reading it later. In other words, if a read receipt appears, people 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. Since a colleague on the US West Coast was retiring recently, we tried holding 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 read receipts, with embodied experiences returning.

We were able to shake hands. When I tried to hug, it blacked out because it was '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 new possibilities like that beyond the smartphone.

We are actually researching VR and making it usable in actual industries. For example, when building or maintaining structures, or when making estimates, there are systems that allow us to show customers things in VR as if they were really there.

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 everything in 3D space, but as you said, we are clearly approaching that era, and I think it will become a form where users lead and the technology side follows the cutting-edge users.

Regarding something I made recently, an AI car tachometer. I think this will probably be integrated into smartphones. To show 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 direction 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 back 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 closer to AI.

That's right. Smartphones themselves are increasingly being replaced by AI. It's also becoming possible to 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, so 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.

Neural network technology, which Professor Muto has been working on, has seen incredible progress over the last 10 years. I feel that the voice recognition performance by the team from Microsoft and the University of Toronto in 2012, which surpassed 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 diffused into our living environments, computers have become able to understand human intent 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 inevitably 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 a touch panel. Turning on lights, asking the time. He debuted with voice assistants before tablets or smartphones; he's like a voice-assistant native or an AI native.

We've entered the era of Star Trek (laughs). Even if they don't know where the physical smartphone is, the AI interacts with them.

Did he learn that by watching what Mom and Dad were doing?

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, and when I went to a friend's house with my daughter and they had a Google Home, she said, 'Mr. Guru-guru 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-large house, our awareness has turned toward movement within the home, and it feels like our relationship with devices has changed.

Just one thing to brag about, but the first house in Japan to install Wi-Fi was mine. 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 Wi-Fi was fully set up shortly after I entered. When we were there, I feel SFC was able to differentiate itself from other campuses just by having high-speed wireless internet with an always-on connection. I'm a bit curious if that kind of differentiation exists now.

Kodama-san's question is hard to answer, but I certainly think that's a very important point. Universities can be slow-footed regarding various facilities.

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

In terms of technical infrastructure, that's true. From a different angle, for example, there's the idea of a 'special zone for rules.' Around the time I graduated, I was telling Professor Kokuryo to make SFC a campus where personal data could be collected freely through sensing. I think if we had everyone sign a waiver upon entering SFC, and faculty and students all conducted research with free access to personal data, we could do research that is highly differentiated.

But in Japan, people immediately say this is personal information and cannot be done legally. 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 network-side infrastructure under the current legal system. That's actually influenced by Apple and Google's designs too; they have policies where apps cannot be provided unless consent is obtained at every step when they take information.

Even for taking a single 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?

Currently, Toyota is building a city called Woven City at the foot of Mt. Fuji. Since the smart city concept, especially in Japan's case, takes a lot of time and effort to negotiate with the administration, Toyota is using private land as an experimental field to build a city and experiment 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 daily is alive.

I also wish we could collect more and more data at school. I think the maturity of users is also appearing in the aspect of multiple versions of an individual existing within a smartphone.

The author Keiichiro Hirano called it 'dividualism,' but I think there could be a compromise where, for example, within SFC everything is processed by login name and location information is known, but that's just one 'dividual.' The idea that it must be integrated into a single individual feels more out of place.

However, you can't draw a line unless you make everything open once. If you do it bit by bit while 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-19, the US is 100% open and makes all data accessible to anyone, but that is not the case for Japan or even European countries. While they claim to have open data, in reality, only specific people can access it.

Only the US makes it completely public and open, allowing anyone to handle the data as they please. There is a big difference there; it feels dynamic, and I feel that the US has that kind of power. Good ideas don't necessarily come from experts. I completely understand why Kodama-san says we should provide a space where data can be used freely.

Returning to the topic of mobile, I would like to point out that carriers had an enormous amount of influence in terms of device development. Since things were made for i-mode or as i-apps according to these 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," they said, "We made an amazing device, so we'll allow you to connect it to your network."

Indeed, there is a deep-rooted, strange master-slave relationship, especially in Japan. But if you make something good like Apple did, the operators should have to listen to you. Whether Japanese manufacturers can overcome that will lead to future technological innovation. Your point strikes 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 incredible, the master-slave relationship changes.

Innovation on the internet was originally about autonomous decentralized cooperation. However, with mobile and Web 2.0, the architecture tends to lean toward a centralized direction.

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

Please create SFC Money. Make it so that only SFC Money is accepted within SFC.

I agree. As for today's keywords, I think the theme of being user-driven was consistent throughout. Technology is certainly advancing, 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 cannot let go of.

We have started living our lives always carrying these smart devices. They are equipped with various sensors, and data that used to be difficult to collect is being generated constantly.

There are certainly business challenges and excitement in bundling that data for use, and when you consider that one in two humans is exchanging data in a state of constant connection, I thought that the worldview itself would change.

Also, looking at it as a university faculty member, I feel that universities are slow to move. When I think about students—who are users at the cutting edge—coming to the university, I felt that the university must get various things in order and properly appeal its attractiveness. Thank you very much for the wide-ranging discussion today.