

Sony Group’s Executive Deputy President Hiroaki Kitano told a World Economic Forum (WEF) session on Tuesday that artificial intelligence is crucial in helping today’s scientists.
Speaking at the ‘Lift-off for Tech Interdependence?’ panel at Davos, Kitano explained that the impact of AI has “propelled science in an unprecedented speed which will change the form of civilization for decades to come.”
The Sony Chief Technology Officer added that companies cannot focus on one area of development at once, such as only focusing on AI. He said it has to be a combination of various fields.
“For example, it would be really powerful to have an AI scientist in the biomedical field, combined with robotics and laser optics,” Kitano said. “It could really give us an extremely important breakthrough in the drug discovery, regenerative medicines, reproductive medicines and aging control.”
The CTO told the WEF session that humans “have to work with AI” to be able to “digest very large scales of information and to come up with hypothesis making sense out of that data.”
Responding to a question about why American companies are in the lead when it comes to AI, Kitano said: “[Japanese companies] are not fading away. We are in the game.”
He said that US companies seem like they are in the lead because of their focus on humanoids, or a human-like robot.
“When Japanese companies tried to develop a humanoid, we couldn’t really find the decent application at that time,” Kitano explained.
The Sony executive said that humanoids have seen a real boom in the last five years. However, Japan is waiting to see if the humanoids will really survive in the coming five years.
“Humanoids are very expensive,” he told the panel. “That’s why we have much less emphasis on the humanoid and more emphasis on the more specialized robotic.”
Joining him in the session were Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, Capgemini CEO Aiman Ezzat, Nature journal’s Editor-in-Chief Magdalena Skipper and Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez.
The panel was moderated by WEF’s Managing Director Jeremy Jurgens.