How does digitalization affect society?

Youichi Nonaka, corporate chief researcher in Hitachi’s Research and Development Group, will speak at Purdue on May 15 as part of the Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series.

Nonaka, who joined Hitachi’s Research and Development Group in 1992 to focus on industrial robotics, digital engineering and production control, will give a lecture titled “Are the Benefits of Digitalization, Such as Industry 4.0, AI and Robotics, Truly Contributing to the Realization of a Sustainable Society?” at 9:30 a.m. in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121. Nonaka has been a professor at Kyoto University since 2018 and vice chair of the CIRP Corporate Members Advisory Group since 2025.

About the lecture

In modern society, mechanization and automation have dramatically increased labor productivity and drastically changed the labor structure. In the future digital society, how should humans and machines, including AI and robots, interact?

Experts in Japan and Germany have been exploring this issue since 2017. In 2019, Nonaka helped advance a Japan-Germany expert dialogue on humans and machines and helped experts publish a discussion paper at Germany’s National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech). The paper points out that excessive assistance from machines could lead to a loss of innate human insight and creativity. They asserted that for a sustainable society to be realized, it is essential for humans and machines to share experiences and knowledge, help each other and continuously improve the productivity of human society.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, human society has undergone dramatic changes not only in lifestyles but also in values. People are facing complex crises such as the intensification of regional conflicts and the worsening of natural disasters. Considering these circumstances, international experts gathered once again to discuss what policies should be adopted to build a sustainable society, particularly in the area of collaboration with machines, including AI and robotics. This presentation will introduce the content of the discussions held by experts from Japan, the United States and Europe on this issue and other challenges ahead.