What was this lecture about? — An off-campus training session to consider careers in the age of AI.

This lecture was a career education presentation given by Kento Motomura of Macnica to first-year students at Yokohama Science Frontier High School, on the theme of "How to build a career in the age of AI." Rather than a lecture on how to use AI, the presentation, which included demonstrations, conveyed to high school students how they should think about their future paths and ways of life in an era where AI is changing work and society.

A Super Science High School (SSH) is a high school designated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology with the aim of nurturing future science and technology talent through advanced science and mathematics education. Yokohama Science Frontier High School is an SSH-designated school and is also a "school that prioritizes college entrance guidance" by the Yokohama City Board of Education. This lecture was held at Kanagawa Public Hall as part of the school's off-campus career education training. The school's stated objectives for the training were threefold: ① to consider future careers, ② to recognize the importance of contributing to society, and ③ to learn about diverse values.

The lecturer, Kento Motomura, is the head of the AI & Digital Business Development Department at Macnica, where he leads the development of new AI businesses. Macnica is a technology trading company that handles cutting-edge technologies such as AI, semiconductors, and cybersecurity. On this day, Motomura chose a format where he would not give a typical lecture where he would read slides, but instead interact with the students, actually create something with AI, and have them think about "the skills necessary for the coming era" through that experience.

What Motomura wanted to convey most was "the power to keep trying things for yourself," rather than "what you will become."

What Motomura most wanted to convey that day was that in the age of AI, rather than deciding what it will become once and being done with it, the real weapon will be the ability to formulate hypotheses, take action, test, and continuously reflect on them.

There's a reason for thinking that. Motomura showed the students two "unexpected changes."
One factor is the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. While e-commerce and communication infrastructure grew significantly, transportation, aviation, travel, and restaurants all faced hardship, and these once glamorous industries popular with job-seeking students changed overnight. Another factor is the changes brought about by AI. Motomura cited the research paper "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" published in November 2025 by the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University. According to the paper, since the advent of ChatGPT, employment of young people aged 22-25 in AI-sensitive occupations has decreased by approximately 16%, while employment for experienced workers has remained stable. Software developers are a symbolic example, and the research points out that jobs that can be learned from textbooks, such as implementation, are more likely to be replaced by AI. Conversely, the value of people who can leverage their experience to effectively use AI will actually increase. As the very "content" of jobs is being redefined by AI, clinging to job titles is actually becoming more dangerous, Motomura said.

So, what should one rely on? Motomura's answer here was his own life story. He dedicated six years of middle and high school to baseball but never made the starting lineup, pursued comedy in college, studied abroad at Disney World, and then spent a long time working on new AI projects at Macnica—it's certainly not a straight path. Nevertheless, Motomura says that after 20 years, the point where "what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can make money from" all converged (his reason for living) has finally come together. Even if it seems like a roundabout way, if you keep trying without giving up on what you "love," it will eventually connect—these were words he spoke from the perspective of his own journey.

Motomura breaks down this "continuing to experiment" into three habits and hands them over to his students.

The first step is to articulate your ikigai (purpose in life). Write down the points where the four points mentioned earlier overlap, translate the gap between your ideal and reality into action, and reflect on it as an experiment—using AI as a sounding board will improve the accuracy of this process.

The second point is to compare yourself to your past self, not to others. Studies show that social media is a device that shoves other people's "best moments" into your own "lazy time," thus eroding your self-esteem. The person you should compare yourself to is the person you were yesterday.

The third is a growth mindset. This is the idea, advocated by Carol Dweck of Stanford University, that abilities can be developed through effort. Failure is merely "data that a failure occurred," and one should use it to develop the next hypothesis without letting emotions get in the way. What should be praised is the process rather than the result.

Motomura continues, AI is the partner that will dramatically accelerate this trial-and-error process. However, there are proper ways to use it. Instead of simply handing over the answer, you should have your own hypothesis before asking the question. Don't blindly accept the answer you get, and if you're not convinced, keep pressing for answers. In the end, you are always the one who makes the decision. Those who act first will get the data first and be able to repeatedly test their hypotheses first—"act first, then reflect." The most important message of the day was that this repetition is what makes you strong.

He demonstrated that "power" right there on the spot—from a student's request to the game starting up.

Motomura demonstrated this "try it first" principle not just through words, but by doing it on the spot. He used an AI agent to respond to requests from students immediately, transforming them into interactive games.

At the venue, everyone was given an anonymous posting board on their smartphone. Problems, ideas, and requests for things like "I want you to make this"—among the posts that flowed in one after another, there was a straightforward request for "I want you to make a dating sim" and an idea that garnered a particularly large number of votes: "How can I make an AI into a handsome guy that I like?" Motomura took the students' voices as his starting point. "Okay, let's make something based on everyone's requests."

On the spot, Motomura brings together the gathered ideas into a single game concept. "How about a romance simulation game where a high school girl who is only interested in science and a handsome boy who loves different fields of science fall in love, and innovation occurs through the combination of romance and science?" He verbally conveys this concept to the AI agent "Claude Code." An AI agent is an AI that, in order to achieve a goal given by a human, breaks down the necessary tasks and executes them on its own. The AI, having received the instructions, simultaneously began creating a prototype of the game, project introduction slides, and a logo.

As the code piled up on the screen, Motomura's commentary continued without interruption. "While the AI is creating, humans think about what to create next." Saying this, he improvised a song using the music generation AI "Suno" during the waiting time. The theme was "A Love Song Between Humans and Chimpanzees"—a song based on the fact that human and chimpanzee DNA are approximately 99% identical, which became the background music for the venue.

Then the game starts. Its name is "EUREKA! (working title)". Players choose a protagonist from five types of "introverted high school girls who are only interested in science" and a partner from five types of handsome boys specializing in physics, biology, chemistry, information science, and geology/astronomy. There are two gauges: "LOVE," which represents romantic feelings, and "EUREKA," which represents the enthusiasm for collaborative research. Reaching the true ending requires more than just one of them. The invention that is born changes depending on the 25 combinations of protagonists (5) and partners (5). For example, a physics girl and a biology boy might create an "artificial hibernation capsule," and a chemistry girl and an information science boy might create an "AI for new material discovery." The mechanism is that new innovations are born from the multiplication of different fields.

What the students witnessed here wasn't a technical demonstration of "AI agents are amazing." It was the experience of seeing their own ideas come to life and become something playable right before their eyes within minutes. If they had an idea, they could try it out that same day. The words that Motomura spoke of in the previous section—"Just act, try it, and reflect"—remained in the room not as an explanation, but as a tangible result at that moment.

What did the high school students ask Motomura? — Approximately 490 posts about AI gathered on Slido.

During the lecture, students were able to anonymously ask questions directly to Motomura through the smartphone posting tool "Slido." Approximately 490 questions and posts were submitted that day. Among them were many surprisingly fundamental questions directed at the speaker, who specializes in AI. The students' interests were strongly focused on "the limits of AI thinking," "AI with emotions and personalities," and "the value humans hold in the age of AI." The following are excerpts from posts submitted to Slido, based on the original text with the contributors' names concealed.

• "Given the current theory that generative AI language models (LLMs) and human language perception are almost identical, do you think an AI language model can be recognized as a distinct personality? As a company at the forefront of AI development, we would like to hear your views on black-Box AI systems."
• "With the emergence of AI-generated content, how do you think the value of content created by humans will change in the future?"
• "Will the day ever come when AI possesses the same level of thinking ability as researchers?"
• "I want to create an AI that has emotions and subjective consciousness. Are you conducting any research on that?"
• "Can I gradually replace my personality with AI and become immortal like Theseus' ship?"
• "One of the problems with AI is that humans can't know what the learning results will look like until they are output. What are your thoughts on that?"

In response to the employment data presented by Motomura, some students asked follow-up questions that delved into the accuracy of the primary data, such as, "Regarding the data showing a decrease in the employment of young engineers, do you also have data on the changes in the number of aspiring engineers by age group in recent years?" Furthermore, in response to Motomura's explanation of "how to approach AI," one student posted a thoughtful comment, "It seems difficult to draw a line between dependence and the act of refining hypotheses." This was precisely the moment when the students were internalizing the attitude of "using AI with your own hypotheses" that Motomura wanted to convey.

The lecture concluded with a question-and-answer session. In response to the question, "Will AI's logical thinking ability continue to improve?", Motomura replied, "Its deductive thinking ability is undoubtedly improving. The challenge for each company will be how to overcome the 'wall' that lies beyond learning from data all over the world." To the question, "Will AI with emotions and AI that recognizes its environment become a reality?", he responded, "Learning highly personalized data such as facial expressions, gaze, and voice waveforms is necessary, and it will probably be some time before generative AI and emotion recognition are completely integrated and become indistinguishable from humans."

And finally, a student representative who aspires to become a pharmacist offered these words of thanks: "I was told that pharmacists' jobs would be taken over by AI, and I was scared to learn that even my favorite music could be created by AI. But it would be a waste to simply dismiss it with the phrase 'I don't want to leave it to AI.' This gave me an opportunity to think about how to demonstrate the value and reason for being human, and how to live." Rather than viewing AI as a threat or an all-powerful tool, it was a moment when what Motomura wanted the high school students to take away from this lecture—to re-examine "how to live one's own life"—was returned in the students' own words.

From "learning" about AI to "experimenting" with AI

The lecture that day highlighted a shift in AI learning: from understanding its risks and how to use it to immediately shaping and testing one's own ideas. As AI takes over more tasks, the center of value shifts towards humans who think about, experiment with, and choose what they want to create. This aligns with high school students' approach to career paths, where they should act on their current interests rather than deciding on a job title beforehand.

As evidenced by the approximately 490 posts, students were already beginning to view AI not with fear or overconfidence, but as a question of "how will I use it, and how will I live?" We hope to continue creating learning opportunities like this, not just by showing AI, but by working together with students to build things themselves, in collaboration with educational institutions.

About the authors and speakers

Kento Motomura
Head of AI & Digital Business Development Department Macnica

He has been involved in AI and new business development for over 12 years, leading more than 300 AI and DX projects. He currently oversees AI product development, AI professional services, and the global ecosystem. Meanwhile, as the AI creator "MOTOKEN," he produces music and video works, and promotes AI media in the entertainment x AI field, such as "This is an AI experiment" (distribution begins August 1, 2026). His television appearances include NewsPicks' "1on1 Deep," TOKYO MX's "Honest Summit," and TV Asahi's "8-Second Grand Prix." His belief is that "AI maximizes people's 'purpose' and 'strengths'"—"I am the first guinea pig in this experiment."