The Japanese government finally announced its policy for AI talent education. To me, this is just another instant reaction without thinking too much that we’ve seen many times in the past.
In 1987, the government said we need to educate software engineers because there will be a shortage of 40,000 system engineers and programmers by 2000. In order to solve this problem, the government launched a plan to train 16,000 teachers who would be responsible for teaching programming at junior high school.
Did Japan become a top country in this domain? Nope. India, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines are doing a much better job right now.
In 2016, the government said we need to educate security experts who can prevent the country from getting cyber attacks because there will be a shortage of 200,000 security experts. Again, Israel and Chine are doing a much better job. Do you see the pattern here?
When the government says ‘educate’, it means they are trying to create more users, not inventors. Creating more AI users, particularly people who can use deep leaning, do not make Japan the leading country in AI. In fact, it’s forcing people to become consumers of AI, not producers. There is a huge gap between the two.
Look at Canada. Why does this country host so many scientists who contributed to fundamental research in AI? To name a few, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Robert Tibshirani (a core contributor of LASSO which my startup uses it a lot), they are either born, lived, studied or worked in Canada.
If Japan were serious about being the leading country in AI, then all investments should be made toward creating more researchers in statistics, mathematics, machine learning, and AI fields. I strongly feel sorry for our children who are obligated to go through this ridiculous education policy driven by the government.
We must do something about it.