Japan wants to turn its factory floors into the proving ground for the next frontier of artificial intelligence. The question is whether it still has time.

At her New Year’s news conference, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said Japan would harness decades of high-quality operational data from its manufacturing and service sectors to advance “physical AI” — systems that allow robots to autonomously support human workers with unprecedented precision. Around the same time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the CES technology show in Las Vegas that physical AI would define the next wave of innovation.

The concept is straightforward, even if the technology is not. It refers to systems that understand the real world’s spatial structure and physical laws and act accordingly.........

© The Japan Times