Will "Smart City" augment intelligence and virtue of Humankind? ："Smart City, Fungi and Buddha" Kickoff discussion by Yasuto Nakanishi, Masashige Motoe, and Hajime Ishikawa.

Smart City, Fungi, and Buddha. However it might be difficult to connect these three words, we have started a project to explore a new vision of our world and cities through post-human-centered design with a perspective of these keywords.

We are going to have discussions with researchers, designers or artists, and our goal is to broaden our perspectives through the discussions with experts in each field. For this purpose we have decided to focus on five following topics: 1) Future of Design, POST Human Centered Design, Pluriversal Design, 2) Technology and New types of Urban Activities, 3)Ecology with nonhuman intelligence and multi-species anthropology, 4) The art of thinking and living beyond human knowledge, and 5)Autonomous car, Robotics and AI”.

The project members, Yasuto Nakanishi, Masashige Motoe, and Hajime Ishikawa had a kick-off discussion. Why "Smart City,” ”Fungi" and "Buddha"? This article will help you to see the connections and the speculative and provocative perspective.

Yasuto Nakanishi (Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University)
Masashige Motoe (Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University)
Hajime Ishikawa (Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University)
Kotaro Okada (Editor)

Urban landscape  covered with networked robots 

Okada: I would like to ask how this project started. Nakanishi-san is the leader of this project. Why did you choose the keywords, "Smart City, Fungi and Buddha", for the above topics?

Nakanishi： I am not sure where to talk about it, but let me first introduce the transition of my research topic. I am a HCI (Human Computer Interaction) researcher and designer for mobile computing and ubiquitous computing. I am interested in the new relationship between information space and real space using mobile technology or sensing technology. People talk about such relationships in terms of keywords such as ubiquitous computing, IoT, and more recently, Society 5.0 and digital transformation. However, with the widespread use of smartphones, it has seemed to me that the connection between information space and physical space has become narrower because of the immersive nature of these devices. I got the feeling that people were even talking to their neighbors through their smartphones, and I no longer felt personally interested in creating apps for smartphones. 

Around the same time, I began to take an interest in robots. It was around this time that the practical application of self-driving cars began to become a reality, and I thought that in an alternative future, non-human-like robots, smart objects with mobility and intellectual capabilities, would appear in the urban spaces where we live. Then, my interest turned toward a world where objects that are not that highly intelligent, but have the ability to process information and move around, are all around us. If self-driving cars start driving around the city, a network of robotic intelligence will cover the city, and this could create a new urban experience in which people feel as if they are receiving a service at the end of the system, without knowing by what algorithm the car will drive around the city.

I don't know if an urban landscape in which intelligent objects that we cannot understand 100% continue to move around us is comfortable or not, but I think such a landscape would emerge in the near future. I am not sure if it will be called a "smart city" or not, but at the very least, there will be a leap from what has been called a "city" so far. However, I think that this is a little different from the idea of the “Singularity", in which intelligence that surpasses humans will emerge.

Will "Smart City” augment intelligence and virtue of Humankind? 

Okada: So, while you include the term "Smart City" in the project name, you are not sure if our future city is a "smart city”.

Nakanishi: To be honest, the word “Smart City” may limit our imagination for our city of the future.

Motoe： I think most people think “Smart City” is just a city with sensors everywhere.

Nakanishi：When translating Smart City into Kanji characters, there are several candidates such as intellectual city (知的都市)  or intelligent city (知能都市). 
When translating “Artificial Intelligence” into kanji characters, the Japanese expression is “人工知能”, but in Chinese one is “人工智慧”. “人工知能” and ”人工智慧” have slightly different nuances in kanji characters for Japanese people. Similarly, “Smart City” might be translated into “知的都市”, “智慧都市”, or “機知都市”, and the nuance would be different for Japanese.

Ishikawa: Indeed, the term “smartphone” tends to be accepted simply as a word without clarifying whether it means that the tasks that have been done so far can be done smartly or because it is full of sensors. It might be true for “Smart City”.

Nakanishi： "Smart City" is just a platform for various kinds of systems, and I don't think there is enough discussion about what is going in it or what is going to happen in it.

Motoe： The only things that are discussed about conventional smart cities are things that can be quantitatively measured to the extent of "using personal computers to increase productivity with Excel and Word," such as "increasing energy efficiency" and "improving security”.

Nakanishi：When personal computers first appeared and the Internet began to spread, researchers had serious discussions about how human intelligence would evolve or be augmented. Looking at the current state of SNS, I feel that they might be utopian discussions, but just as a knife can be a tool for killing people, it is a matter of how we use tools and environments. I personally think that there should be more discussion about what Smart City brings out from us. 

There has been a goal in urban planning to improve human life such as improving the working environment and preventing the transmission of epidemics. A smart city woudl be worth to build if it has intelligence beyond human with tons of sensors, and can bring out the spirit of generosity or more clever decisions, and increase intelligence and virtue of humanity.

Motoe: To understand smart cities, I think the "hyper" and "post" mentioned by Toshiki Sato, known for "Shakai wa JohoKa no Yume wo Miru“ (Social Dreams of Informatization) and other works, would be helpful. Japan has repeatedly and continuously said since about the 1970s that the information society is finally coming, but he states that there are two major ways to read each era. One is "hyper," which refers to a high-performance society that is an extension of the same values, and the other is "post," which believes that somewhere a threshold will be crossed and a singularity or other event will occur to create a completely different vision of society.

The same can be said for smart cities, but the current discussion is only about smart cities as hyper cities, not about smart cities as post-cities. This is because the Establishment wants only the "hyper" and has no expectations for the "post," which is why it cannot get money, but the "post" definitely has potential.

I would like to discuss "post“ in this project. If there is a smart city as a post-city or post-urbanism, what would it be like? I would like to have the opportunity to study and think about this with various people.

“Fungi" as a symbol of networked and bottom-up intelligence  

Okada: So, what is the intent to pick up fungi as a keyword?

Nakanishi:  I became interested in fungi when I saw the results of a study that showed that fungi also have intelligence[1]. We call them "fungi" only for their flower-like parts that send out spores, but their main body is a network of mycelium. In Oregon, U.S.A., there is a fungi that mycelium is the size of 2384 acer (965 hectares)[2]. The fungi that are usually visible to the human eye are only a small part of the whole, and they actually exist in the soil with mycelium. The relationship between the invisible network of mycelium and the visible part of the mushroom can be another metaphor for considering the existence of services in the city. Invisible network services cover the city, and visible parts of those services, such as self-driving cars, appears. We utilize both invisible background service and visible foreground service.

Ishikawa: The "intelligence" you say is collective intelligence connected by communication technology, isn't it?

Nakanishi：That’s right. People who use smartphone services can use them without knowing the full extent of the service. People don't know how they receive signals from radio towers and how their IDs are handed over. It is normal they don't know how they are able to use the service, and the infrastructure that supports our urban life is all like that.

From electricity and water to railroads, the physical infrastructure and services have become more flexible over time. I think cities of the future will transform as infrastructure becomes even more dynamic and equipped with intellectual capabilities. I don't know if we will call it “Smart City” and even it is difficult to know what to call a city, since the definition of “City" is vague. 

“Buddha" as a symbol of top-down intelligence with a broad and long perspective beyond human 

Okada: OK, and why "Buddha"?

Nakanishi: I think it will be easier to understand the sensor network if we imagine it as a top-down intelligence with a broad perspective beyond humankind, but, in Japan, the "Chinju no Kamisama(guardian god)” would be a better metaphor than “God". I think the image of a localized and scattered intelligence beyond human protecting the city is more familiar to Japanese people and easier to understand. Motoe-san and I were chatting about such a view before.

Motoe： It is like “Ujigami" worship (like tutelary deity worship), isn't it?

Nakanishi： I think it also can be nice to have a worldview in which there are several kinds of gods scattered around us, rather than a monotheistic worldview in which there is an absolute god somewhere in the universe watching over us.

I believe that how we deal with intelligence beyond human knowledge has not changed so much since ancient times. How to understand new types of intelligence like AI or robots could be an extension of the ways of dealing with things beyond human or different from human that have existed locally in each culture. Thus, it would be possible to understand smart cities from our own cultures with the metaphor of the "Chinju no Kamisama(guardian god)" or “Buddha." In order to discuss a new type of city different from conventional modern city, it is important to discuss on a scale that deviates from Human-Centered-Design whether it is fungi or Buddha, I believe.

Thus, we began to discuss smart cities in symbiosis not only with AI or robots but also with fungi and Budda as intelligence beyond humankind. And we raised a question about how it will affect our intelligence, virtue and humanity. I believe it could lead to overcoming our limited rationality or anthropocentrism. Sorry I am talking for a long time, anyway, something interesting will happen if we think about future cities with the metaphor of fungi and buddha, we believe.

Multi-species anthropology, Info-sphere, Post Human-Centered Design 

Nakanishi: I have recently learned of the genre of multi-species anthropology. It utilizes a method of fieldwork that looks at people's lives from all angles by focusing on the inhuman. Books like "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins" by Anna Tsing and "How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human'' by Eduardo Kohn were very inspiring. 

Motoe：It sounds like ordinary ethnology when you only hear that part.

Nakanishi： Ethnology is the study of describing people of different ethnic groups that an observer has never encountered before, but the book "The Mushroom at the End of the World" is written like a documentary in which an observer follows matsutake mushroom as an approach to investigate people he or she has never encountered before.  This book describes the human race as seen through the pursuit of a species called matsutake. For example, the history of the people who pick matsutake mushrooms in the U.S., how they were sent to Japan to become a commodity, and the place of matsutake mushrooms  in the politics of the U.S. and Japan.

On the other hand, Eduardo Kohn's "How Forests Think," rather than observing humans for understanding them, attempts to deal with the species broadly, seeing humans as just one agent exchanging meaning within that semiotics just as animals live in the forest exchanging symbols. Kohn believes that blindly assuming that nature is good because anthropocentrism is bad is a kind of European Romanticism, and deviating from this, we then set forth "Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human" as a way to grasp human and nature. This leads to the concept of "Multi-species Anthropology.

Motoe： So, non-human beings such as animals and plants, AI, and robots are also subject to anthropology, right?

Nakanishi： While mere anthropology is a way for people to observe people, multi-species anthropology is a new style of anthropology that tries to highlight human activities by observing the relationship between people and non-human entities such as animals and plants. Taking this idea as a guide, we need to consider the agents that appear in cities, whether they are humanoids or robots with intelligent capabilities such as self-driving cars, from the perspective of the entire ecosystem that includes them.

In thinking about symbiotic ecosystems with AI or robots, Timothy Morton's "Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics" is a good reference. In this book, Morton describes ecology as a relationship that includes inanimate objects surrounding humans and does not need to be limited to nature.

As another reference, Luciano Floridi's "The 4th Revolution: How the info-sphere Is Reshaping Human Reality” is also inspiring. He says that the things surrounding us are not only physical artifacts and natural objects, but that we are building an "info-sphere," a sphere that includes information, in which the activities of the real world are being overridden.

Ishikawa: Online meetings using Zoom, for example, can be called a new info-sphere experience.

Nakanishi: That's Right, Zoom has been available since COVID-19 became popular, but I had only used it for one-on-one meetings with researchers in U.S.A. I think that most people were able to jump to a new type of experience because COVID-19 was non-anthropocentric. During the 3.11 disaster in Japan, people did unite, and it might be because it was a big crisis above imagination.

If we think in the conventional way of design, i.e., human-centered design, we can make small jumps to solve inconveniences around us, but we cannot make big jumps. I believe that there is a limit to thinking about smart cities using the current human-friendly approach of human-centered design.

Not to Problem Solving, But to Make Discontinuous Jumps 

Okada: How did you get involved in this project, Motoe-san?

Motoe： My recent area of interest is close to what Nakanishi-san mentioned. I frankly thought it would be interesting to have an opportunity to think together with people I trust, so I joined the project.

I was interested in how computerization would affect physical space design. Later, I became interested in mechanisms for coming up with new ideas, such as design thinking, and since 2010 I have been running the "Sendai School of Design," a design education program that conducts collaborative projects with people from many different genres focusing on architecture.

Personally, I am not interested in making a technical solution to a problem and verifying its feasibility; I find it more interesting to come up with something that everyone has not thought about.

In my five years of running the "Sendai School of Design," I have found that while everyone is interested in solutions, they do not seem to be very interested in redefining problems that have not yet been expressed, and for me, it was a little unsatisfying. I think it is not a radical design because it is good to improve functionality and efficiency, and in most cases, it is not accompanied by a change in values.

Ishikawa： There is usually a tendency to stop at small talk without much radical thinking.

Motoe: Motoe: Of course the idea of human-centered design is important, but it tends to allow people to think in the same domain, and it is difficult to reach something unexpected. Such an idea of “Smart City, Fungi and Buddha" does not come up with such a method. I am basically involved in education and interested in what kind of program and place should be set up for people to generate such ideas.

In this project, I want to put myself in the discussions that aim in a different direction rather than have a strong vision that I want to verbalize and realize. I would like not to be pulled into discussions that only aim to improve performance as an extension of conventional approaches. As for personal expectations, I would like to be able to talk endlessly about "I don't know what you're talking about, but it's interesting”.

The Age of Tuning and Negative Capability 

Okada: What kind of issues did you have in mind when you joined this project, Ishikawa-san?

Ishikawa: I used to work in the design department of a construction company as a landscape designer among civil engineering and architecture people. After changing jobs and moving to a university,  I have been thinking about how I can connect my knowledge and skills of my past career with research at SFC(Shonan Fujisawa Campus, Keio University).

Landscape design could be finding a way to reconcile people with nature. However, people who specialize in landscape, including myself, surprisingly do not like people, and often prefer nature. Landscape designers sometimes pretend to be human-centered, even though they think that the ecosystem would work better if people were removed from places they design.  I felt a similarity between this kind of distress and my interest in what kind of world will be created with stranger intelligence, and when I heard about this project from Nakanishi-san, it kicked me.

Several years ago, I saw a Nakanishi-san's project that was a swarm simulation of trash-can robots moving in an American university campus which automatically move regardless of human intentions. Although it might be difficult for us to understand such an environment with stranger intelligence robots, I believe that as we live in it, we will find ways to adapt our behavior to the situation and explore ways to be comfortable.

The image that Nakanishi-san mentioned could be similar to "giving up," "seeing how it goes," or "being at a loss," which has never been taken up as a design method. Nowadays, only useful things are required, and things that are considered useless are eliminated. However, what is said to be useless can be considered as useful after 10 centuries. I am interested in the potential of "giving up," "seeing how it goes," or "being at a loss,” because it might be included into design methods in a new era.

The landscape is also often used as a persuasive material to justify development and construction. However, I would like to consider a different way of landscape design. It is said that Japan's landscape has entered the age of maintenance after the age of construction, as the country enters a phase of population decline, and I believe that the next phase will be the age of tuning. Maintenance will reach our limits of resources, and it will become necessary to find another comfortable place to settle down with plants. The method at that time will be something that has not been considered as a design method until now, and I think "how to deal with what we don't know" will be a hint for that.

“Smart City" sounds to me to be simply applying words that we are familiar with to phenomena that we don’t know. We might be trying to describe things just with our existing vocabulary, although in fact there are things that may happen that we don't understand.

Okada: What you just said reminded me of the concept of "negative capability.” It is the ability to remain in uncertainty, wonder, and skepticism without seeking reasons impatiently  when confronted with a difficult situation. This ability might be necessary when facing an intelligence different from humans.

Ishikawa: We conveniently interpret the world based on our body or knowledge, but sometimes I suddenly realize that nature exists independently of human beings. For example, when a honey bee flies over a flower in my flowerbed, sometimes the flowers look happier when bees stop. No matter how much I water the flowers with love, it is no match for that natural way of being. This can be told as an interesting episode, but it is quite difficult to systematize. I feel that this project has the potential to acquire a perspective that connects non-human beings and talks about them.

How to Pass on COVID-19 to Future Generations

Okada: Nakanishi-san, you mentioned earlier that the pandemic, an inhuman event, caused a big jump. Did the pandemic caused by COVID-19 have any impact on this project or its theme?

Nakanishi：I don't know whether our current state will become the norm or whether we will return to our former normal lives, but it will at least broaden the scope of our daily lives. In particular, the importance of mobility will change. The variations of human mobility, objects mobility and information mobility will expand. Especially, I think robots will be used more in distribution centers than ever before, and robots will play a more active role in hospitals or restaurants. We know the potential of the technology, but we just haven't had the opportunity to use it to their fullest.

All kinds of changes will occur, including how we use cities. In the parlance of multi-species anthropology, I don't know if this new species is AI as software or robots as hardware, but we can expect that the direction of coexistence with more digital things will accelerate along with this new species.

Okada: This is the latest pandemic since the Spanish flu, and it is said to be a "once-in-a-century pandemic." This event or disaster is beyond human scale, and therefore, I think there are aspects that are difficult to pass on to future generations.

Motoe： At Sendai city, you will see that the city is located far from the sea. At first glance, it may seem like an inconvenient location, but it is said to be the result of the castle town Sendai that was built by Masamune Date, the feudal lord at that time, as part of the reconstruction from the Keicho tsunami about 400 years ago. In fact, the castle town area suffered only minor damage from the earthquake compared to hazards around the city. I think it is common to rediscover such facts about disaster prevention and quarantine embedded in a city after a long time has passed.

Ishikawa: After the Great East Japan Earthquake, we went to see the affected areas, and while many architects were talking about how to fix the broken parts, Reijin Nakatani (a professor of architecture, Waseda University) said that it was more important to search the parts that did not break and those secrets. It is the start point where "Sen-nenmura Project (Millennium Village Project)"[3] began. I strongly agree with the idea that we should be able to get longer range insights by exploring the secrets of the long-lasting parts of the system. I think that what Motoe-san mentioned could be considered an extension of this idea.

Taking on the Complex World and Unfamiliar Things 

Okada: I am excited that "Smart City, fungi and Buddha" will be a project that will create a completely new perspective amidst the emerging unconventional view of ecology.

Nakanishi: I feel that various people are sensing the "end of modernity." People might be beginning to realize again that the world is not as simple as we thought it was. As Ishikawa-san said, taking on such a complicated world and unfamiliar things without understanding them easily may require a strong mentality.

Ishikawa：Many people may want to get an answer that is easy to understand and feel relieved. When I see how SNS are raging, I strongly feel it.

Motoe： It looks like they want to pretend that such complicated things do not exist.

Nakanishi： The feeling of being surrounded by unfamiliar things must be insecurity, and anxiety might make people rough. However, we tend to forget that human beings have been dealing with things we don't understand for a long time. I am from Nara, which was the Japanese capital one thousand and three hundred years ago, and I have lived surrounded by temples, shrines, ancient tombs and mythology and they are things beyond modern human knowledge.

Ishikawa: I'm from Uji in Kyoto, famous for Byodoin temple, and it could be true that we can feel in the Kinki region that the world has been created above our rationality.

Nakanishi：The Suzaku Gate in the Heijo-kyo Palace site in Nara was rebuilt several years ago. The Heijo-kyo had been just a field, however, in order to commemorate the 1,300th anniversary of the Heijo-kyo Capital, the gate was rebuilt. But as an ex citizen of Nara, I feel that it would have been better if it had always been a field. The more we are surrounded by technology, the more we are deviating from the sense of keeping such mysteries as mysteries. 

The world does not exist rationally according to the logic of humankind. Under such circumstances as climate change or pandemic, we have to think sincerely about how to live again. In fact, humankind has continued to associate with things that we do not understand completely for a long time. The desire to understand it is the wellspring of science and technology, but the art of dealing with it as it is is also a form of human wisdom.

Toward the Next Discussion
This trilogy of the three project members provided a guide for what should be discussed in "Smart City, Fungi, and Buddha.” We will invite researchers, designers or artists to discuss these topics.
1) The future of design: POST Human-Centered Design, Pluriversal Design
2)Technology and New types of Urban Activities
3) Ecology with nonhuman intelligence and multi-species anthropology
4) The art of thinking and living beyond human knowledge
5) Robotics and AI

[1] https://www.tohoku.ac.jp/japanese/2019/11/press20191108-01-kin.html
[2] https://www.tohoku.ac.jp/japanese/2019/11/press20191108-01-kin.html https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus/
[3] http://mille-vill.org/

(Text by Naruki Akiyoshi, Editing by Kotaro Okada, Translation by Momoko Yoshida))