Visions for 2050: A Collection of Dreams Published by NIRA
This report, published by NIRA (Nippon Institute for Research Advancement), is a collection of visions in which 134 researchers, business leaders, policymakers, journalists, and practitioners imagined “Japan and the World in 2050.” I contributed to ”Chapter 5: Harmony Between Technology and Humanity — Ethics and Society in the Digital Age”.
https://nira.or.jp/paper/research-report/2026/issues-theme2050.html
The perspectives gathered here are remarkably diverse — in how contributors understand the present moment in 2026, in their approaches to policy, and in their relationship to technology, at every level — from the personal to the local to the planetary — with a wide range of arguments and underlying values.Rather than a “forecast of the future,” this collection reads more as a response to the question of what we hold dear, what we feel called to tend and pass on, and how we want to live — a question asked while gazing at both past and future.
Hope and urgency coexist throughout. Expectations for AI, regenerative medicine, energy, and quantum technologies run high, while deep anxiety about population decline, the erosion of democracy, exclusionism, social fragmentation, and environmental crisis is widely shared. 134 voices is a considerable number — and yet, set against the full breadth of humanity alive today, the perspectives gathered here represent only the faintest fraction of what is being lived and felt.
We are now — through the immeasurable depth of each person’s experience and inner life, and through our collective experience — bearing witness to a civilizational question.
The report is in Japanese, but I am glad that capable browser translation tools make it possible to share it beyond those borders.
<Contributed Essay>
Shoukei Matsumoto
The modern world is more connected than ever, and more deeply divided. The root of this paradox may lie not in a lack of common ground, but in an excess of certainty about being right. Individuals, organizations, and nations remain entangled with one another while clinging to their own perspectives, building countless walls through which no one’s voice can pass.
The society I dream of for 2050 is not one that overcomes this impasse through new technologies or new forms of justice — but rather a future in which humanity has rediscovered, within the richness of being wrong, a wisdom it has always carried.
By “being wrong,” I do not mean simply making mistakes. I mean the humble and courageous awareness that one’s own perspective is never the whole of the world. Just as Shinran once called himself bombu — an ordinary, fallible being — our imperfection and limitation are not flaws to be overcome, but the very conditions that make it possible to keep learning from others and remaining in connection with the world. This, I believe, is the “human literacy” our time calls for.
This humility rewrites the operating system of our society. It would fundamentally change, for instance, how we relate to AI. Rather than using AI to generate predictable reactions that reinforce our existing views and deepen our filter bubbles, we would use it as a mirror for self-reflection — asking it not to confirm us, but to show us how we might be wrong.
The practice of questioning our own certainties gives rise to deeper dialogue and genuine collaboration. Only then can we truly be with others — with other lives, and with generations yet to come. This is not a distant ideal. It begins with releasing yesterday’s certainties and meeting the world anew, each day. In that quiet, ordinary practice, the future opens.
