The Story of My Intellectual Life
In the early 1970s I discovered that “Kubla Khan” had a rich, marvelous, and fantastically symmetrical structure. I’d found myself intellectually. I knew what I was doing. I had a specific intellectual mission: to find the mechanisms behind “Kubla Khan.” As defined, that mission failed, and still has not been achieved some 40 odd years later.
It’s like this: If you set out to hitch rides from New York City to, say, Los Angeles, and don’t make it, well then your hitch-hike adventure is a failure. But if you end up on Mars instead, just what kind of failure is that? Yeah, you’re lost. Really really lost. But you’re lost on Mars! How cool is that!
Of course, it might not actually be Mars. It might just be an abandoned set on a studio back lot.
That’s a bit metaphorical. Let’s just say I’ve read and thought about a lot of things having to do with the brain, mind, and culture, and published about them as well. I’ve written a bunch of academic articles and two general trade books, Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution (Harry Abrams1989), co-authored with Richard Friedhoff, and Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books 2001). Here’s what I say about myself at my blog, New Savanna. I’ve got a conventional CV at Academia.edu. I’ve also written a lot of stuff that I’ve not published in a conventional venue. I think of them as working papers. I’ve got them all at Academia.edu. Some of my best – certainly my most recent – stuff is there.
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.