Changing Technology while Protecting Unchanging Values

Tachi:This issue of Hitachi Review is titled “Technology for Living and Life,” and among the infrastructure system technologies for supporting lifestyles, we’re focusing on the water environment as well as on disaster prevention and security.

In recent years, the rapidly increasing demand for resources and energy resulting from economic development, the increasing severity of climate change, and growing economic disparities have become common issues throughout the world, and the impact on people’s lives and foundational infrastructure systems is spreading. Considering that background, I would like to ask you how infrastructure should change in the future.

Shin:The rich and convenient lifestyle we enjoy today is supported by various technologies provided by our predecessors. But from another perspective, technology has allowed us to exceed our capacity and evolutionary limits as human beings, and so it can be viewed as changing our lifestyles and society. From the industrialized society that arose from mechanical technologies like the motors that were Hitachi, Ltd.’s founding product to the information society that has arisen from information technology (IT), the pace at which we are advancing is accelerating. In the Society 5.0^(a)image of future society, advances such as artificial intelligence (AI) will further accelerate the pace of development, to the point where the growth curve of humanity and society is predicted to reach a “singularity”^(b). The relationship between technology and humanity is thus at a turning point. When considering technologies for lifestyle infrastructure, we must consider such change alongside the relationship between humanity and technology.

(a) Society 5.0

A series of initiatives toward realizing a “super-smart society” in which cyberspace and physical spaces are tightly integrated, as advocated by the Japanese government in its 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan. The name indicates scientific and technological innovation that leads to innovation for the creation of a new society, a successor in the progress from hunting to agricultural, industrial, and information societies.

(b) Singularity

The advancement of AI to such an extent that it exceeds human intelligence, the use of which marks the arrival at a singularity (a point that is discontinuous from previous progress) in the evolution of human intelligence.

Tachi:Will requirements for lifestyle infrastructure change as technology accelerates the pace of evolution?

Shin:There may not be large differences in basic human needs, but raising minimum standards of living in the future will require addressing the evolution of technology from a global perspective, not only in developed countries. To address the common global issues you mentioned before, the United Nations has proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim at things like eradicating poverty and hunger and ensuring access to water and sanitation. Raising minimum standards of living will have effects such as reducing factors leading to terrorism and military conflicts, and is therefore highly significant from the perspective of security. One indispensable element for achieving this is improvement of lifestyle infrastructure through economic and technical support from the international community.

Tachi:Hitachi has also been engaged in business with the SDGs in mind, and we believe that there are many contributions that we can make through technology.

Shin:The idea of using technology to make everyone happier is also consistent with Hitachi’s founding spirit. What’s important is to provide truly necessary technologies that meet with the realities of each country or region, aiming for a way that lets both Hitachi and its customers develop sustainably. In particular, emerging and developing countries have a strong need for contributions to infrastructure development based on the experience of developed countries, so I think that it is important to take inventory of all the technologies accumulated by Hitachi over the past century—from motors to its recent Internet of Things (IoT) platform Lumada—and organize them so that they can be used when necessary.

Tachi:Recently in the field of infrastructure, technologies that were once developed for domestic use and subsequently forgotten have started attracting interest overseas. What’s important is not that these are the latest, cutting-edge technologies, but that consideration is being given to what’s necessary for resolving issues.

Miyao:Of course, digital transformation has also progressed in cutting-edge fields, and cyber domains are expanding. How do you think this will change lifestyle infrastructure?

Shin:The relationship between cyber and physical is an indispensable factor when considering directions of change in lifestyle infrastructure. Recently CPS^(c) and IoT have become buzzwords, but mixing the virtual with the real is nothing new—the financial world has developed since long ago by incorporating the virtual concept of “credit.” However, if the virtual domain is overinflated and too far removed from reality, like in a bubble economy, it becomes dangerous. The key will be maintaining balance between the two, using cyber to advance beyond physical boundaries.

Tachi:Japan’s water supply and sewerage facilities are facing many issues, such as aging facilities, fewer experienced technicians, and smaller budgets. There are movements toward overcoming these issues using digital technologies like CPS and IoT, but what do you think, as a new committee member on the Waterworks CPS Committee of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare?

Shin:The important thing is to discern what will change and what will not. In Japan, mutual effort between public and private entities has realized a stable, safe, and secure water supply. We need to consider how to protect these unchanging values using changing technologies in accordance with the era. For example, if waterworks stations are connected via cyberspace using the concept of symbiotic autonomous decentralization^(d) proposed by Hitachi in addition to being physically linked via conduits, then it will be possible to advance system-wide optimization that enables efficiency and more flexible operations. That will make cooperation easier in the event of a disaster.

In asset management and the succession of operational technology (OT), we would ideally like to be able to integrate previously separate paper drafts, manuals, and other documents, and to simulate operations in a 3D facility map. It’s still necessary to experience actual work sites, but one advantage of digital technologies is that they allow virtual exploration of hard-to-see areas and simulation of unexpected occurrences that can’t be experienced in normal times. In the future, the lifestyle infrastructure lifecycle—from development, maintenance, and scaling down, to stable operation—will likely be experienced by other Asian countries as well. When those countries face similar challenges in the future, the technology and know-how accumulated going forward will surely be useful.

(c) CPS

An abbreviation for “cyber–physical system.” A system that realizes optimal control by collecting various physical space (real-world) states as data, appropriately analyzing the data in cyberspace using big data processing technologies, etc., and feeding the results back to the controlled object in physical space. This is a similar concept to the IoT, but CPS has a broader meaning, including embedded systems that fuse cyber and physical without passing through the Internet.

(d) Symbiotic autonomous decentralization

An extension to the system level of the autonomous decentralization concept that Hitachi has applied to systems for traffic and industrial control (constructing highly reliable and highly scalable systems through autonomous subsystem cooperation). In addition to optimizing on-site equipment and facilities, symbiotic autonomous decentralization also shares, analyzes, and utilizes information through to the management level for corporate-level, system-wide optimization, aiming to realize optimization and value creation throughout the value chain, including at other companies.