The term Society 5.0 was formulated by the Japanese government in 2016 in the Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan.

We didn’t expect Covid pandemic at the time, but I believe that the experience of the Corona pandemic will further accelerate us toward Society 5.0.

Before Society 5.0, society was defined as

• Society 1.0: Hunting Society (more than 10,000 years ago)

With the Ice Age, the hunting society ended. It is said that it is called acquisition economy.

• Society 2.0: Agricultural Society (10,000 years ago – )

Global warming has led to the miniaturization of plants and animals and a corresponding shift to a production economy. During this period, humans settled in a fixed location and probably developed a language to engage in communal activities. This began in 7000 BC.

• Society 3.0: Industrial society (mid-18th century-)

The mid-18th century is around 1750. In Japan, it was during the reign of Shogun Yoshimune Tokugawa, and the industrial revolution had begun in the Edo period. The year 1868 was the first year of the Meiji Era , which means that Japan started to adopt the world’s situation and entered the industrial society around this time.

Incidentally, the current form of bookkeeping in my field was also introduced in the Meiji era.

• Society 4.0: The Information Society (20th century-)

The 20th century is after 1990. Japan was not yet an information society. In 1989, the Nikkei 225 lifted maximum 38,915 yen and the following year, 1990, the bubble economy burst and the Nikkei 225 fell below 20,000 yen. In 2008 Lehman Crisis and it was around that time that the information society took off in Japan.

• Society 5.0: A human-centered society that achieves both economic development and solutions to social issues through a system that highly integrates cyber space (virtual space) and physical space (real space).

It started in 2016.

It is very interesting to look at it chronologically like this. We don’t know when the hunting society started, but it is about 90 centuries from the agricultural society to the industrial society, 2 centuries from the industrial society to the information society, and 1 century from the information society to Society 5.0.

I can imagine that the agricultural society must have been really stable and happy because it was forced to change and change. From the industrial society to the present, things have been changing at an accelerated pace, so I thought it shows that people’s happiness has not lasted for a long time because of such instability.

In the current Society 4.0, we in physical space can obtain information only by accessing cyberspace, but it takes time to find valid information, or we do not know how to access it in the first place.

When you are actively accessing information, you need to know how to search and what you want to find. So it also happens that you can get better information by looking at the whole thing in the paper. For example, when I was younger, the only place to look for a job was at the Employment Security Office, where had a list of jobs in all kinds of fields, and I thought, “There are jobs like this.” I entered the world of tax accounting when I saw a job opening at the Employment Security Office and found the words “Bookkeeping Level 3” in the remarks column. Nowadays, whether it is at the Employment Security Office or on the Internet, we search for a job by first putting in my own preferences. This is effective for those who have a clear idea of what they want to do and how they want to do it, but for those who are just looking for a job for some reason, just searching is not clear. Probably 80% of people are just looking for a job for no reason at all.

For people like me who use the Internet for work, it is a convenient function, but for people who don’t use it for work, it is very difficult to search and find valid information by themselves. So they give up and go back to the world of paper.

Society 5.0 allows you to be passive and still get the information you need when you need it.

To achieve this, the Internet of things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and robots are essential.

I won’t go into the details of what Society 5.0 is here, but what I’ve read about is a dreamlike world of Society 5.0: from a vertical to a horizontal world, from urban concentration to rural decentralization, from accepting a declining birthrate and aging population to providing for a decreasing workforce, from revitalizing industries with a shortage of labor to coexisting with nature and making language a non-obstacle. It is written that it is.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I have never worked in a so-called big company. Therefore, I have never experienced the bad aspects of information in specific division ( not share all ), existing barriers, seniority systems, and so on. Of course, there are many good aspects to these aspects. When I meet my friends from my school days, I often hear about these bad aspects. Will these bad aspects disappear in Society 5.0? Will the good aspects disappear instead?

People are educating people now, in schools and in the workplace. This somehow creates problems such as harassment. People are not very good at what they do, so they are taught, and by teaching, they are connected, but nowadays, no one says anything because it immediately becomes a problem. So there is a gap between people who can do things and those who can’t. This is the same for people in the workforce. People become great people by experiencing many different things. It is sad to say that we neglect education without letting them experience various things, but in fact, various problems occur, so neglecting education is happening to avoid them. Will robots be the solution to these problems?

It will take time for the Society 5.0 world to become a great world, and when it is a great world, we will be plunged into a new one. I wonder how old I will be then.