In the Japanese corporate state, such reports are generally triggers for action rather than tomes that gather dust on the shelves of some minister, and the specific areas recommended for research by the Council for Science & Technology are artificial intelligence; high-speed image processing; new materials, advanced circuit designs and new manufacturing technologies for logic elements; and higher capacity memory chips; the report also warns that more researchers, particularly software engineers, must be trained to meet the research goals – according to government forecasts, Japan’s shortfall of programmers and system engineers will top 960,000 by the yera 2000, against a 40,000 shortfall in 1985; it also recommends joint research with foreign scientists, and that the government should put up even more of the cash for research programmes than it has in the past, on the grounds that future requirements are of a more social nature than in the recent past.
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