Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture is pioneering the use of artificial intelligence and chatbot technology, becoming the very first city in Japan to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The 4,000 municipal workers have begun a one-month trial to use ChatGPT for administrative tasks, in hopes of improving efficiency and helping address the nation’s worker shortage.
Takayuki Samukawa from the Yokosuka’s Digital Management Department, has expressed his optimism with the new technology. ChatGPT provides a real opportunity for the city to downgrade their labor-intensive managerial duties, and to free up the workers for person-to-person interaction. The chatbot will be in use during the trial for tasks like summarizing, drafting documents and developing copy.
The federal government showed interest in ChatGPT adoption, after a visit from OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman to the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. However, security concerns were raised by the government and Altman agreed to comply. After that, the Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno announced the intention of the government to use AI to reduce the workloads for the national public servants.
OpenAI is a nonprofit organization founded by the co-founders of Tesla and SpaceX, Sam Altman and his business partners. They are committed to building a safe and beneficial artificial intelligence, by believing that the AI should work with and for humans, not against them.
Sir Christopher Pissarides, is a Nobel Prize-winning Economist from the London School of Economics. He has made key contributions to economics in the areas of search, matching, labour market and macroeconomics, as well as published various works on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on jobs and the workweek. He has also discussed the importance of implementing an effective strategy to transition to an era of AI-driven economy.
