The Yomiuri Shimbun
Professor Yasuo Deguchi delivers a speech at the Inaugural Kyoto Conference in Kyoto on Tuesday.
18:13 JST, September 23, 2025
Scholars and corporate executives gathered together at an international conference started in Kyoto on Tuesday to exchange views on the “multilayered society of values.”
The Inaugural Kyoto Conference, a two-day event held by Kyoto Institute of Philosophy, which is engaged in creating a philosophy for the era of artificial intelligence. The conference aims at exploring and proposing a shared vision for the future in the face of challenges such as the rise of AI and changing international dynamics.
In his keynote speech, philosopher Yasuo Deguchi, a professor at Kyoto University, who also serves as cochair of the institute, said that the values of individuals or communities may sometimes conflict or contradict each other and “I think this our reality.” He said that the layered accumulation of these values is what he called multilayered values.
“I believe the mission of the institute is to affirm the multilayered values — not to deny it — and to propose diverse, multilayered values, thereby realizing a multilayered society of values,” Deguchi said.
Jun Sawada, executive chairman of NTT, Inc. and cochair of the institute, emphasized in his opening remarks the importance of holding discussions between “academia and industry,” amid the “very unpredictable” global situation.
Philosopher Markus Gabriel, professor at the University of Bonn in Germany, who also serves as senior global adviser of the institute, also delivered a keynote speech on Tuesday.
Gabriel said “we live in an age of nested crises … climate change, the crisis of liberal democracy and rising geopolitical tensions.”
He said of the “disruptive power of AI, bioengineering and other dimensions of scientific progress” overlap and feed into each other.
Gabriel called himself a “relentless optimist,” adding that, “if we build moral innovation labs powered by ethical intelligences and grounded in serious transcultural cooperation, we can turn crisis into opportunity.”
Moral innovation labs, according to Gabriel, are “places where ethics, technology and culture work together to address the moral challenges of our time.”
Various panel discussions were held later that day. Katsuhiko Hibino, president of Tokyo University of the Arts and Hiroshi Ishiguro, distinguished professor of the University of Osaka, known for his research on androids, were participants in one titled “AI and the Question of The Human.”
AloJapan.com