Digital technologies, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence are seen as mater‑of‑course parts of the world today. Japan, as one of the leading countries in technological innovations, is the most advanced in terms of approach to digital society. Japanese society and government have been working on a new concept of life where all the digital technologies will communicate through the internet. Society organised in this way is called Society 5.0 – super Smart society. In Japan, this concept is centred about seventeen sustainable goals (United Nations, 2018). Society 5.0 is a reaction to the fundamental technological revolutionary changes known today as Industry 4.0. Thus, Society 5.0 is the consequence of a technological revolution that will eventually affect not just the production but all parts of today’s life as well. The new technologies evoke some fundamental philosophical and existential questions. How can technological advances improve the prosperity and functioning of society? What about the privacy and security of all the users? The present paper compares Japan and the Czech Republic from the perspective of digitalization of society based on three main aspects: government programs supporting digital technologies, number of technically educated experts and investments in science and research. The objective is to find out how much the Czech Republic has advanced towards preparations for digital society.

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There is an unwritten assumption that success and business ethics are closely interrelated, and that it is not possible, in a successful business, to disregard moral and ethical principles on the long run. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to verify such an assumption.Knowledge of ethics and its relations with economics are vague, inconsistent, partially subjective and sparse. That is why it cannot be studied using traditional mathematical and statistical methods.

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This article introduces the results of the first survey of Czech civil servants specifically targeting the domain of public ethics. The survey serves a double purpose: to provide data relevant for the development of a tailor-made ethics training programme for public officials, and to answer two research questions: (1) What are the main factors influencing the core values in Czech public administration? (2) Does the existence of ethics resources contribute to an improved ethical climate in the Czech public administration as perceived by public officials? The findings show that an ethical code is the most widespread, but often the only, ethics instrument implemented in Czech public administration and that the code is not used effectively. The results also confirm a positive but weak influence of the number of ethics resources on the perception of the existence of ethical problems, and a slight direct correlation between a higher number of resources and the perception of positive ethics development in the workplace. No support is found for the assertion that the more ethics resources are used by the organisation, the greater is the importance of the organisational culture for decision-making. This empirical research illustrates that - unlike in other countries of the former Eastern Bloc - ethics has been a low-priority agenda in Czech public administration and that enhancing ethical standards, and thus increasing citizens’ trust in public services, will be a long-term process. Leadership and leading by example, alongside ethics education and training, are the avenues to pursue.