Why are Westerners afraid of robots, but Japanese are not?

[ Translation of an article by Japanese author Joi Ito - a journalist, entrepreneur and activist working with Wired magazine ]

As a Japanese, I grew up watching such anime as the Evangelion [Neon Genesis Evangelion], which portrayed the future, where people and machines merged in cybernetic ecstasy. Such programs made us children dream about how we would become bionic superheroes. Robots have always been part of the Japanese spirit. Our hero, Astro , was officially registered as a resident of Niidza , north of Tokyo - and this is quite a challenge, as any person born outside of Japan will confirm. We in Japan are not just not afraid of our new host robots, we are practically waiting for them.

Not to say that Westerners did not have any friendly robots at all, such as R2-D2 or Rosa , the homemaker-robot of the Jetson family. But compared to the Japanese, the Western world is more cautious about robots. I think that the difference in approaches is somehow related to different religious contexts, as well as historical differences associated with industrial slavery.

The western concept of "humanity" is very limited, and I think it's time to ask if we have the right to exploit the environment, animals, tools and robots simply because we are human, but they are not.
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In the 1980s, I was at a meeting organized by the Honda Foundation , where a Japanese professor — I don’t remember his last name — claimed that the Japanese integrate robots much more successfully into society because of the local religion, Shintoism , which still remains the official religion of the country.

The followers of Shinto, unlike the monotheists in Christianity and the Greeks that preceded them, do not consider people to be anything special. Instead, they see spirits in everything — something like a Force in Star Wars . Nature does not belong to us — we belong to nature, and spirits live in everything, including stones, tools, houses, and even empty spaces.

The West, as the professor argued, faces the problem of endowing things with spirits and feelings, since he considers anthropomorphism , endowing things and animals with human qualities, childish, primitive, or simply undesirable. He argued that the Luddites who destroyed automatic weaving machines that deprived them of work in the 19th century serve as an example, and for contrast he demonstrated how they put a cap on a Japanese factory, gave it a name and treat it as a colleague, and not as scary enemy.

The idea that Japanese take robots is much simpler than Westerners is very common today. Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese multiplier who created Atomboyoi, noted the relationship between robots and Buddhism, saying: “The Japanese do not distinguish between a person, supposedly a supreme being, and the world around him. Everything is interconnected, and we take robots without labor, along with the rest of the world, with insects, with stones - all this is one. We have no doubts about robots, which are considered pseudo-humans in the West. Therefore, there is no resistance, just a tacit acceptance. ” The Japanese, of course, first became an agrarian, and then an industrial nation, the influence of Shinto and Buddhism retained many rituals and spirituality in Japan from the period preceding humanism.

In the book " Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind ", the Israeli historian Yuval Noi Harari describes "humanity" as something that developed on the basis of our belief system when we changed, turning from hunters and gatherers to shepherds, farmers, and then capitalists. Nature did not belong to the early hunters and gatherers, they were part of nature. Many Aboriginal people today still live within the framework of belief systems reflecting this point of view. American Indians listen to the wind and speak with it. Native hunters often use complex rituals to communicate with prey and forest predators. Many cultures of hunters and gatherers are deeply connected with the land, but they do not have the land tenure tradition, which remains a source of misunderstanding and clashes of Western colonists even today.

Only when people began to engage in farming and animal breeding did we have the concept of owning other things, owning nature. The concepts that any thing - a stone, a sheep, a dog, a car, a person - may belong to another person or corporation, the idea is relatively new. In many ways, it serves as the core of the idea of ​​humanity, of what makes people special, protected by the class, and reduces them from human positions, suppresses everything that is not human, be they living beings or inanimate objects. Dehumanization and the concept of ownership in the economy gave rise to large-scale slavery.

In the book " Marked from the Beginning: The Complete History of Racist Ideas in America ", the historian Ibram Candy describes the debates of the colonial era of America, which discussed whether to convert slaves to Christianity. British laws postulated that a Christian could not be a slave, and many plantation owners were worried that they would lose slaves if they were converted to Christianity. Therefore, they argued that negros are too primitive to become Christians. Others argued that Christianity would make the slaves more obedient and ease control over them. In fact, these debates were about whether Christianity, which gives the slaves a spiritual existence, the possibility of control over them, increases or decreases. The idea of ​​endowing something with spiritual traits is alien to the Japanese, because from their point of view everything has a spirit, and it cannot be allowed or forbidden.

Fear of being overthrown by the oppressed class, or turning into an oppressed, with a heavy burden pressed on the minds of those in power from the very beginning of mass slavery and the slave trade. I wonder if this fear is unique to Christians and Jews, and whether it can fuel the fear of Westerners in front of robots. In Japan, there was something that could be called slavery, but it never took an industrial scale. [Here the author is cunning - the strict hierarchy allowed the owner to calmly take even the life of the subordinate; see the novel "The Shogun " / approx. trans.].

Many influential people (in other words, mostly white men) of the West publicly speak about their fears of how robots can potentially gain power over people, strengthening this idea in the minds of the public. However, the same people are in a hurry to build robots that are powerful enough for such a task - of course, insuring with the help of research on how to maintain control over the machines they invented, although this time the Christianization of robots is not (yet) included.

Douglas Rushkoff , whose book “Team of Humanity” is coming out next year, recently wrote about a meeting at which one of the participants expressed fears before the rich could control the security personnel guarding them in armored bunkers after Armageddon - monetary, climatic or public. Financial titans at this meeting brainstormed ideas such as collars, controlling access to food stocks, and replacing people with robots. Douglas suggested simply starting to better treat his security personnel before the revolution, but they decided that it was too late for that.

My friends expressed their concern over how I made the connection between slaves and robots, believing that I was somehow dehumanizing slaves or their descendants, thereby exacerbating the already existing tension in the war of words and symbols. And although the fight against the dehumanization of minorities and the poor is important, and I often spend a lot of my strength on him, it was concentration on human rights, not on environmental rights, animals, and even such things as robots that led us to this mess environment. In the long run, perhaps, it is not a matter of humanization or dehumanization, but of the problem of creating a privileged class — people — which we use to arbitrarily justify, ignore, oppress and exploit.

Technology has come to the point where we need to start thinking about what rights robots deserve, and whether they deserve and how to establish and exercise these rights. Just to imagine that our relationship with robots would resemble the relationships of human characters in Star Wars with C-3PO , R2-D2 and BB-8 robots would be naive.

As Kate Darling, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, points out in her work to expand the legal rights to robots, there is ample evidence that people sympathize and react emotionally to social robots - even unwise ones. I don't think it's just curiosity; I think we should take this very seriously. When someone kicks a robot or cruelly treats it, we feel a strong negative emotional reaction - among the many amazing examples cited by Darling in her article is the story of the American military, who canceled the experiment with a robot that moved on its feet, clearing minefields in this way - because I considered the experiment inhumane. This is an example of anthropomorphization, and we have to think about how cruel treatment of a robot affects a person who torments him.

I believe that simply replacing oppressed people with oppressed machines, we will not correct the fundamentally vicious order that has developed over the centuries. As a Shintoist, I am obviously prejudiced, but I believe that the study of “primitive” beliefs can be a good starting point. It can also help the perception of the development and development of machine intelligence as the "expansion" of intelligence, and not as artificial intelligence that threatens humanity.

In the process of inventing rules and rights for robots, we will probably need to build a line of conduct before we even know what impact they will have on society. The golden rule dictates that we treat others the way we would like them to treat us, so the cruel treatment and dehumanization of robots prepares children and society to continue to strengthen the class stratification of society that has existed since the beginning of civilization.

It is easy to see how ancient shepherds and farmers could consider a person to be something special, but I think AI and robots can help us come to the conclusion that perhaps people are just one example of consciousness, and that “humanity” somewhat overvalued. Instead of getting hung up on human centrism, we need to develop respect, emotional and spiritual dialogue with all things.