The Future Returns to People

2026.10.05

In short: A visit to the Osaka-Kansai Expo showed me a future where technology connects everyone, yet human warmth stands out more than ever. It led me back to a question I have asked for years: will bars be replaced by technology? Only places with a clear reason to exist will remain.

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A world where everything is done with a single smartphone.
Tickets, reservations, maps, languages, payments:

all designed to connect seamlessly and digitally with people around the world.

There was a world where being connected to the whole world through technology is simply “normal.”

And yet, strangely, it didn’t feel cold or mechanical.

Exhibits that felt as if someone were speaking to you face to face,
films that seemed to stay close to someone’s life,
staging that let you feel there were people there: they were everywhere.

Everything appealed not to words but to the senses,
experiences that resonated with “people,” beyond cultural differences.

The further technology advances,
the more what only people can do stands out.

And I think human skill will sharpen human sensibility even further.

In the final area of the Sumitomo Pavilion, where photos and video were forbidden,
a real, living person was dancing at the centre of beautiful digital imagery.

It felt as if that person’s very presence were being extended by technology.

On the way home from the Expo site, in the smiles of the staff lined up and waving to us, I felt a will of “omotenashi” (Japanese hospitality) that had decided, “This part, at least, we won’t make digital.”

The casual guidance and care of the staff we met along the way all felt natural and warm.

The “future” I saw there was a space made efficient so that people can focus on what people should do, and a warm future where kindness and intuition are respected.

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For many years now, I have kept thinking about one question.

Will the bar profession someday be replaced by technology?

Even listening to people,
AI and digital tools may already do it better.
Apt responses, vast memory, service that never tires:
in some areas, I even feel they have already surpassed humans.

Even so, I still think:
“Why this place?”

“Why this person?”

Only the places that can answer that question clearly will survive into the future.

This was always obvious as a business.
A shop whose reason for being chosen is vague will eventually be weeded out: a principle that has not changed, past or present.

But the times have surely changed.
With the evolution of technology, ordering, service and information are leaving human hands.
More and more things genuinely work without people.

That is exactly why the places that will remain in the coming era
are those with a clear “reason it has to be this place.”

Attentive service and delicious drinks alone may no longer be enough.

They are already a given, and no longer set you apart.

The fusion of technology and people I witnessed at the Osaka-Kansai Expo.

I felt that what will remain in the future is surely our “way of being” itself.

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Finally, let me share a little of the video I filmed at the venue.