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How Smart Technology Is Enabling The Next Stage of Human Evolution
How Smart Technology Is Enabling The Next Stage of Human Evolution
Even as the global economy is coming to grips with Industry 4.0, the Fourth
Industrial Revolution, according to Japanese experts, society itself has already
moved into a fifth evolutionary stage: Society 5.0.
As defined by the Cabinet Office of Japan, Society 5.0 is the next progression in
human evolution, after hunter-gathering, agriculture, the industrial age and
the information age. It is a vision that puts technolo y at the heart of meeting
the needs of people in a sustainable way, linked to the United Nations’
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Crucially, the aim is to harness
technolo y for the greater good of humanity rather than it being a cause of
social division.
Society 5.0 research points to five key megatrends shaping this human-centric
innovation: Urbanization; Smart Is the New Green; Future of Ener y; Future of
Mobility; and Health, Wellness and Well-being. These megatrends have
emerged to solve a number of challenges faced by Japan and nations around
the world.
Urbanization
Existing infrastructure is struggling to keep up, not only because of the speed
of growth in many cities, but also because much of it is coming to the end of its
life and needs replacing or upgrading.
The technolo y that enables the building of smart cities is a market predicted
to be worth $1.56 trillion by 2025, according to Frost & Sullivan. A combination
of smart devices with sensors—the Internet of Things—and mobile apps are
giving city dwellers access to data that helps them live better—from help
finding parking spaces to efficiently using renewable ener y in their homes,
enabled by smart electricity grids.
Smart Is the New Green
“By 2022, over 60% of global GDP will be digitized,” forecasts the World
Economic Forum. “An estimated 70% of new value created in the economy
over the next decade will be based on digitally enabled platforms.”
The International Renewable Ener y Agency (IRENA) reports that to meet the
Paris Agreement climate goals, ener y-related CO2 emissions need to fall 70%
by 2050, compared with current levels.
That means that the world’s ener y systems and sectors—electrical power
generation, heating, cooling and transportation—need to be decarbonized. “A
large-scale shift to electricity [derived] from renewables could deliver 60% of
those reductions, up to 75% if renewables for heating and transport are
considered and 90% with an acceleration in ener y efficiency,” according to
IRENA.
Japan’s life expectancy, at 84.1 years, is four years more than the OECD
average. Coupled with falling fertility rates, this has created a society with a
new set of needs based around the requirements of a large elderly population,
which has increased pressure on health services and public expenditures.
Venture capital investor Yannick Oswald calls this “the $10+ trillion
opportunity nobody is talking about.”
Lux Research highlights a number of business sectors that could benefit from
ageing societies and help people grow old healthily. These include wearable
devices and smart textiles that can monitor health; robotics, including
exoskeletons and “social robots” for companionship and care; and artificial
intelligence, an increasingly useful diagnostics and therapeutics tool.
At the heart of Society 5.0 is the idea of a “Super Smart Society” in which
these emerging technologies will help meet individual and societal needs to
create truly sustainable development, states the Japanese Business Federation
(Keidanren).
Society 5.0 will require paradigm shifts in many industries, such as a switch in
medical focus from cure to prevention, and the move to electric and
autonomous vehicles. It will also mean new ways of doing business, like as-a-
service models, the sharing economy and circular manufacturing techniques.
Hitachi points out that “the opportunities [of Society 5.0] for enterprises are
significant: The turnover resulting from the development of sustainable
business models worldwide has been estimated at $12 trillion, an economic
value that can lead to the employment in sustainable entrepreneurial forms of
more than 380 million people by 2030.”