KGRI Working Papers 2023

The "Legal Principles of Distributed Management" project (Project Manager: Yamamoto Tatsuhiko, Professor, Keio University) of the JST Moonshot R&D Program (Goal 9) analyzes the benefits and challenges of implementing personal AI in society from a legal perspective. Personal AI is an AI that manages an individual's personal data on their behalf based on their privacy preferences. This can be seen as a tool to support the right to informational self-determination (the right to control one's own information).

This research is a project conducting a comparative study of personal information protection legislation in the EU, Germany, France, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and China. We requested the authors of each country's report to investigate how mechanisms for data subject involvement—such as the right to request deletion, the right of access, consent, and the right to data portability—are stipulated in their personal information protection laws. In particular, we examined the significance and challenges of the right to informational self-determination, focusing on the relationship between constitutional law and personal information protection laws.

The response to COVID-19, a shared historical experience for humanity, triggered a review and reflection on our information society and initiated the construction of new social systems. In the medical field as well, digitalization is advancing, newly connecting various relationships such as those between hospitals and patients, medical care and health, and individuals and their daily lives. The digital transformation (DX) that begins here should not merely replace analog-era systems with digital ones but should lead to new systems premised on digital technology for the benefit of people and society. The three DX seminars on medical care and health held during the COVID-19 pandemic provided an outlook on the medical and health fields from diverse perspectives.

This working paper serves as a summary of those discussions. It aims to widely share the cutting-edge knowledge of leaders active on the front lines of the medical and health fields—which are premised on DX, robotics, AI, and new digital data—and to serve as a cornerstone for tackling new challenges in standardization, developing systems and rules, and exploring the future missions of industry, government, and academia in these respective fields.

The "Legal Principles of Distributed Governance" project (Project Manager: Yamamoto Tatsuhiko, Professor, Keio University) of the JST Moonshot R&D Program (Goal 9) analyzes the benefits and challenges of the social implementation of personal AI from a legal perspective. Personal AI is an AI that manages an individual's personal data on their behalf based on their privacy preferences. This can be seen as a tool to back up the right to informational self-determination (the right to control one's own information).

This research is a comparative study project on personal information protection legislation in the EU, Germany, France, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and China. We asked the authors of the reports for each country to investigate how mechanisms for the involvement of the data subject (right to request deletion, right of access, consent, right to data portability) are stipulated in their personal information protection laws. We examined the significance and challenges of the right to informational self-determination, paying particular attention to the relationship between the constitution and personal information protection laws.

The "Healthy Life Expectancy Extension Project" of the Keio University Global Research Institute (KGRI) 2040 Independence and Self-Respect Project aims to design and propose a social system that links multiple health services in an interoperable manner, utilizing various research seeds, to achieve a sound extension of healthy life expectancy in the super-aged society of 2040. This working paper, as part of the activities of the "Healthy Life Expectancy Extension Project," describes the study of new health services and social systems to achieve the extension of healthy life expectancy in 2040. Based on predictions about the current state and future challenges of health in our country, we focus on behavioral change for health maintenance and promotion as an area that should be targeted. We propose new health services and a system for their implementation that will contribute to solving health-related issues.

More than a year has passed since the release of the Joint Proposal “Toward a Healthy Platform for Public Discourse—Digital Diet Declaration ver. 1.0.” We believe this proposal has enabled us to share the current challenges surrounding the public discourse space with many people and to pose a broad question to society about what is necessary to build an environment for achieving “informational health.” On the other hand, version 1.0 had a somewhat limited definition of “informational health” and did not sufficiently delve into examinations from a neuroscientific perspective, issues of education and literacy, problems surrounding advertising, and issues concerning telecommunications carriers. There was also an insufficient analysis and examination of the specific harms caused by being informationally “unhealthy.” In addition, generative AI, which has rapidly developed and spread in recent months, was completely outside its scope. Therefore, while focusing on these issues, we have conducted further studies toward the realization of “informational health.” This proposal (ver. 2.0) is a compilation of the results of those efforts.

Through the release of this proposal, we hope to share with more people, both in Japan and abroad, the various challenges in the current public discourse space caused by the excesses of the attention economy and to advance the discussion toward overcoming them.