Japan has a declining population. The government, in all its wisdom, has decided to do something about this.
Helping women maintain careers after giving birth? Fixing the toxic work culture that requires gruelingly long hours and male-dominated management?
That can wait. The government is hoping robots will fix things.
As recently reported in the mainstream media, the government plans to allocate a whopping ¥2 billion next year for giving out to local authorities that implement programs where residents find love — assisted by artificial intelligence.
In fact, about half of the prefectures in Japan are already involved in matchmaking services, which you might think should be a private affair.
But regular matchmaking is not enough: now AI is here to save the day and use smarter algorithms to match the right people.
Of course, even if more people do get together in Shimane or Tochigi or wherever, it may very well boost the marriage rate, but that won’t automatically fix the birthrate problem. The reasons people are not having babies is not really — and certainly not mainly — because they can’t find love per se. The government seems to be tying the marriage and fertility rate exclusively together, but the issues affecting the lack of babies are far more wider-reaching and won’t get better with just some expensive AI tech.
This isn’t the first time that robots have been involved in matchmaking in Japan, as we previously blogged about, so we doubt that AI can be a game-changer this time.
What’s next? Will the government send robots into our homes to “help” us complete the insemination process?
