The latest edition of the government's white paper on science and technology includes a section titled "The arrival of super-smart society" that describes what people's lives will be like around 2035 thanks to technological progress. It says that people will be able to design their own automatically driven cars as they like, and that artificial intelligence will produce a menu that suits the health conditions of each individual, to be cooked by robots.
The report also delves into the scientific research environment that produced Japanese Nobel laureates and puts forward proposals to increase the number of future Nobel Prize winners produced by this country.
What the government should be doing, however, is examining whether the policies it has been taking have contributed to strengthening the foundation of scientific research — and to correct the policies where they are failing.
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