Skills Training: Care-giving for Ageing Populations

Mr. Kotaro Tamura, Adjunct Professor, Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore and Chairman, Strategic Initiative of Japan spoke at Salwan Media’s One Globe 2014 conference held at The Imperial hotel in New Delhi, February 2014.

“I want to touch upon two things – one, technology is killing jobs, the other one has a global trend, the new trend will be the age, ageing. India is the least suitable place to talk about ageing but you know I am from Japan; Japan is the most advanced front-runner in the area of ageing.

So going back to the first point, the technological development – simple jobs are taken over by technology, like a man, artificial intelligence. Now artificial intelligence is beating Japanese professional chess players. You know within chess nobody can beat artificial intelligence anymore but Japanese chess is a more complex game. You need more activity, but even though artificial intelligence can beat the very best professionals; simple jobs, but also very complex jobs – such as lawyers or even doctors or accountants – those jobs are starting to be taken over by technologies. So that is scary.

But I want to touch upon the second issue, ageing. In ageing, Japan needs at least one million more caregivers in ten years. So our government tried to counter this problem with robotic technologies, but its not catching up. So in Japan there is a huge need to train caregivers and train nurses from overseas.

I’m a political consultant at the largest caregiving company in the world, called care.com. It was listed last week on the New York stock exchange. They have ten million caregivers for the people who need care. So we are now building a pipeline between the Philippines and Japan for training nurses. So care giving is an area which robotics cannot do, artificial intelligence cannot take over that job and there are huge needs, huge needs.

Even in India, should India start ageing – I mean population growth is going down worldwide, even in India or on the African continent, so after 2050 ageing will be the common biggest issue in whole world – and Japan has a firm plan now. So technology is taking over many jobs, not only simple jobs but also the complex job, very much needed jobs, but at the same time ageing is now creating a lot of jobs for the people.”