“2040 Quest” – A gold standard for how academia can engage in a meaningful dialogue with society!

Posted by Eve Gaumond,
An attorney-at-law, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Montreal, Canada. Specialised in AI law. She joined us in the Research Project Keio 2040 as a guest researcher in the autumn of 2023.

I spent some time at Keio University Global Research Institute (KGRI) 2040’s event in Yokohama Minatomirai. It was energizing and inspiring! A gold standard for how academia can engage in a meaningful dialogue with society.

A few things I took away from the event:

The event was a success in part because it addressed a topic that is relevant to people: how to tackle issues related to Japan becoming a super-aged society (about 40 million elderly people by 2040).

It was also a success because it met people where they were. The event was held in a shopping mall in Yokohama—Japan’s second most populous city—and the organizers thought carefully about how to encourage people to participate in the event. There were candies, freebies, gamification mechanisms, and researchers presenting their work in dynamic ways—one team presented a robot designed to help people maintain good posture at work, for instance.

The event was also strikingly multigenerational. Renowned professors, children dressed up for Halloween, and undergraduate and high school students were all in the same place, interacting with each other. To name just a few examples: scholars took questions from undergraduates about healthy information diets; medical students sat down with preschoolers to teach them about the human body; high school students presented their work on revitalizing a polluted area of their city for the collective well-being of their community (and they went out of their way to do it in English for me!), and undergraduates presented a prototype bicycle that converts CO2 into fresh air.

Not only was the event multigenerational, but it also brought together diverse stakeholders. For instance, a citizen assembly was held with a start-up that works on flying cars. People from government, industry and academia participated in these discussions. Relatedly, I also had interesting conversations about the strengths and limitations of design thinking methods and the strategies people are mobilizing here to overcome those limitations.

Overall, the atmosphere was somewhat reminiscent of the early days of the Montreal Declaration for Responsible AI (Inven_T). It also reminded me of the work MassLBP (Peter MacLeod) is doing with citizen assemblies, and it reinforced my belief in the importance of engaging with the general public on tech-related issues.