A surface-level explanation is that Japan is quite techno-optimistic compared to the west, and has strong intuitions that AI will operate harmoniously with humans. A more nuanced explanation is that Buddhist- and Shinto-inspired axioms in Japanese thinking lead to the conclusion that superintelligence will be conscious and aligned by default.
YES.
I’ve got some knowledge of Japanese popular culture. Robots, particularly anthropomorphic robots, have a strong presence in Japanese popular culture, one that is quite different from Western culture. You should get a book by Fredrick Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia. It’s a bit old (1988), but it is excellent and has been recently reissued in a Kindle edition. Schodt knows Japanese popular culture quite well as he has translated many manga, including Astro Boy and Ghost in the Shell. He talks about the Shinto influence and tells a story from the early days of industrial robotics. When a new robot was to be brought online they’d perform a Shinto ceremony to welcome the robot to the team.
As an exercise, you might want to compare the anime Ghost in the Shell with The Matrix, which derives style and motifs from the anime. The philosophical concerns of the two are very different. The central characters in Ghost are almost all cyborg to some extent. At the very least they’ve got sockets through which they can plug into the net, but some have a mostly artificial body. Humans are not dominated by AIs in the way they are in The Matrix.
I’ve written two essays about two manga by Osamu Tezuka, who has had enormous influence on Japanese popular culture. They are about two of the three manga in his early so-called Science Fiction sequence (from about 1950). Each, in a way, is about alignment. Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan runs through an extensive ontology from insects to space aliens while Tezuka’s Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable about Art and the Cosmos turns on the difference between electro-mechanical robots and artificial beings.
Thanks for the helpful context! We had intuitions in this direction but its nice to substantiate it with these examples. Do you speak any Japanese / have you considered joining the Japan AI Alignment slack channel? You may have a useful perspective to deconfuse conversations there if/when ontology gaps arise.
YES.
I’ve got some knowledge of Japanese popular culture. Robots, particularly anthropomorphic robots, have a strong presence in Japanese popular culture, one that is quite different from Western culture. You should get a book by Fredrick Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia. It’s a bit old (1988), but it is excellent and has been recently reissued in a Kindle edition. Schodt knows Japanese popular culture quite well as he has translated many manga, including Astro Boy and Ghost in the Shell. He talks about the Shinto influence and tells a story from the early days of industrial robotics. When a new robot was to be brought online they’d perform a Shinto ceremony to welcome the robot to the team.
I’ve written a blog post about the Astro Boy stories, The Robot as Subaltern: Tezuka’s Mighty Atom, where I point out that many of the stories are about civil rights for robots. Fear of rogue robots and AIs plays little role in those stories. I’ve also got a post, Who’s losing sleep at the prospect of AIs going rogue? As far as I can tell, not the Japanese, where I quote from an article by Joi Ito (former director of MIT’s Media Lab) on why the Japanese do not fear robots.
As an exercise, you might want to compare the anime Ghost in the Shell with The Matrix, which derives style and motifs from the anime. The philosophical concerns of the two are very different. The central characters in Ghost are almost all cyborg to some extent. At the very least they’ve got sockets through which they can plug into the net, but some have a mostly artificial body. Humans are not dominated by AIs in the way they are in The Matrix.
I’ve written two essays about two manga by Osamu Tezuka, who has had enormous influence on Japanese popular culture. They are about two of the three manga in his early so-called Science Fiction sequence (from about 1950). Each, in a way, is about alignment. Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan runs through an extensive ontology from insects to space aliens while Tezuka’s Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable about Art and the Cosmos turns on the difference between electro-mechanical robots and artificial beings.
Thanks for the helpful context! We had intuitions in this direction but its nice to substantiate it with these examples. Do you speak any Japanese / have you considered joining the Japan AI Alignment slack channel? You may have a useful perspective to deconfuse conversations there if/when ontology gaps arise.
Thanks. I don’t speak Japanese. I’ll take a look at the slack channel.