Imagination for alternative intelligence and the possibility of design to invert anthropocentrism. Guest: Akihiro Kubota on "Smart City, Fungi and Buddha".

How can design change when the term "others” includes super intelligence and extra terrestrial intelligence to its scope? The post-human era will soon be upon us, and designers must prepare for it and reverse the fate of human-centered design. Akihiro Kubota, professor at Tama Art University, says as above in his book, "Design for Faraway Others”. 

We interviewed him to explore the new physicality and intelligence of human beings brought out by such "others," the way to think about humankind while relativizing humankind, and the possibilities of design in a new era.

Akihiro Kubota (Tama Art University)
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)

Humans are the media that carry smartphones

Nakanishi:   In the preface to the book "Design for Faraway Others" [1], you wrote as follows: When humans design with post human-centered design, humans design for humans of the future or non human, and it leads a question "whether it is possible for humans to design for super-existence beyond humans”, or on the contrary, the question has the same type of difficulty as the following question "is it possible for non-humans to do human-centered design?".  This theme is close to what we want to consider in this project "Smart City, Fungi and Buddha," thus we asked you for an interview. Once again, would you tell us what issues you had in mind when you wrote this book?

Kubota: When I wrote this book, "AI" and "Singularity" were just starting to become buzzwords and it was called "the third AI boom". I had an awareness of the problem that I wanted to think about what was different from the first or second AI boom.

Until now, AI was mainly considered to support human thinking. Therefore, to create an AI system, it was first necessary to model the human thinking process. Thinking of human thinking was necessary.This can be described as an anthropocentric approach, which attempts to create an anthropomorphic system through modeling humans. 

However, in this third AI boom, there has not been much discussion about the thinking process or models. What is the model of the latest AI systems? I had a question about such a situation where lots of machine learning systems are rapidly increasing around us and are progressing in a sloppy manner.

Furthermore, as recommendation systems have become popular, people go to places where they are recommended and feedback information at the places to the systems. Rather than humans using smartphones proactively, humans are being used more as a vehicle to carry smartphones.

If our actions are unconsciously directed by a system that we do not understand, should we return to the previous state, or should we raise the level of our understanding and actions? I wanted to think about these questions.

Growing Out  of the Artificial Intelligence like Tuning

Nakanishi: Such systems whose entire images are beyond human comprehension are enveloping us, and we are just seeing parts of such systems appearing as UI on smartphones. It is already our daily occurrence. In the future, such a situation will further develop, and I believe that AI or robots those are UI of more complicated systems will appear in cities as "existence" and "others".

Kubota: Until around the 1990s, AI was discussed from a kind of McLuhanian perspective, that is  computers extend human thinking. But are today's machine learning systems extensions of human thinking? Of course, they may have started out as neural networks that mimic human neural structures, but today's network systems have changed beyond such metaphors. It would be better to say that it is something different from our human intelligence. We need to "reinvent intelligence," not "reinvent the wheel".

Nakanishi: When the Internet first appeared, there were lots of discussions about how it could expand human intelligence. Such discussion might contain McLuhaninan perspectives. However, smart cities are also intelligent environments, but are not so much discussed in such a way. What kind of new type of physicality or new type of intelligence will be created within smart cities is not being discussed. You use the term "vehicle media" for self-driving cars and robots in your book, and what should we think about when vehicle media appear around us?

Kubota: We must think about the problem of smart cities not only in terms of technology, but also in terms of politics. For example, a Chinese-style smart city may be rational as a system, but it also leads to increased surveillance. We must think of ways to create intelligence that is integrated with the environment while at the same time not creating a surveillance society-like dystopia.

Affordable environmental intelligence, which could create a surveillance society, is clearly different from the "AI supporting humans" idea discussed in the 80s and 90s. The human way of being in trying to incorporate intelligence into the environment is prompting a change from the computational view of artificial intelligence that originated with Turing.

Mimic for stepping close to Alternative Intelligence

Nakanishi: HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey" was an intelligence modeled after humans, and that was the view of AI in the 1970s and 1980s.

In this project, we use fungi as a metaphor for a different intelligence from humans that will appear in a network of mono-functional robots that may cover the city. On the other hand, It would be interesting to have a city where people's virtue is enhanced by environmental intelligence, and I cite Buddha as a symbol of top-down intelligence with a broad perspective beyond humans. I think fungi and Buddha can be considered "faraway others" as you described in your book.  What kind of image do you have of these new kinds of faraway intelligence?

Kubota: To consider non-human intelligence is to blur the superiority of intelligence. There is no easy indicator of whether intelligence with high computational ability is superior or whether intelligence that can survive in the environment is superior. First of all, we need to remember the obvious: various types of intelligence coexist in this world. Then we will quickly see that the notion of "beyond human" as in Singularity is unnecessary. It is like a conspiracy theory or populism.

I don't think we should be too pessimistic about intelligence that is different from humans, but I think what we are saying is that we cannot "understand" it. This does not mean that we give up thinking about it. For example, taking the oceanic intelligence of "Solaris," Human intelligence, which has individuals as objects, is inherently heterogeneous. When they meet, what they can do is, at best, try to mimic the object. What Lem Stanislaw wrote in that work is not strange at all. It is natural that we mimic when we try to understand others. It does not matter whether or not the human psyche is deranged as a result. Through the viewpoint that mimicking others is the first step toward mutual understanding, the novel was paradoxically expressing the limits of intelligence.

It is important to think about how human beings can understand different intelligence like fungi. By thinking about it, we should be able to relativize our intelligence. We must abandon the anthropocentric idea of the Turing Test (*a test devised by mathematician Alan Turing to determine the human-like thinking ability of machines).

Motoe: So fungi cannot pass the Turing Test, but they do have their own intelligence. Thinking like that, I realize that there is a lot of room to expand our imagination.

Kubota: That's right. We need to try to have the imagination to imagine others faraway from us even if that might be impossible. Science and technology are not the only ways to depict variations of others. Looking back in history, literature, art, poetry, etc. have been the wisdom to imagine others faraway from us. As with the superiority of intelligence, it is important not to assign superiority or inferiority to human wisdom.

Does "design" have the capacity to include such faraway others in its scope? If we feel the intelligence of fungi, one way is to imitate something similar to it and use it in a simulation. A smart city could be a test bed for design as mimesis.

“Center" and “Normal" block “Awakening”

Kubota: If we look up the meaning of Buddha, of course, it represents a saint, and it also means "one who has awakened" in the original sense. It would be interesting to consider what it means to awaken.

Nakanishi: There are moments when we jump to a new “human being" with different qualities from the past as technology advances, and we might call that awakening.

In "Design for Faraway Others,” Kubota-san wrote that beings who consider humans can never become superintelligent. For example, it can be said that Budda is not always a kind person to whom can’t behave as Budda preached. Humans have also created systems that cannot be completely controlled, such as the economic market and the Internet. Those systems are also  sometimes not kind to humans. Kubota-san has used the term "human-peripheralism." What kind of problem do you see?

Kubota: First of all, we should clarify how the function of the word "center" works. To begin with, what does "center" mean when we speak of "human-centered"? It is a metaphor that being the center is a good thing. When we create an organization, we tend to label it "center," and people tend to want to be the center. Such metaphors are already deeply embedded in our thinking.Human-centered and machine-centered are the same in the sense that we use the word "center”. That is why I used the word “peripheral”. It is a simple use of the word to turn the notion that the center is good and the periphery is evil. I wanted the sense of discomfort generated by this word to be the starting point.

When we consider how peripheralism in design is possible, we would realize that we find such things around us. For example, practicing a musical instrument and trying to improve skill is, in a sense, instrument-centered = human-peripheralism.

Motoe: So the human being changes with mastering the instrument, right?

Kubota: If we were to design an instrument from a human-centered perspective, we should design a piano for humans that everyone can easily understand and play a tune just by pressing one note at a time from the end. Human-peripheralism is not something outlandish. The co-evolution of objects and humans has existed for a long time. Humans were not at the center from the beginning, we see.

Today's human-computer interface designs are designed to be less prone to malfunctions because usability is so important. But glitches and errors come in handy in the creative field. In a Donald Norman-like philosophy for human beings, it is hard to create anything strange. In that sense, the world becomes homogenized and not very interesting. 

I would like many people to carry a counter attitude or an alternative way of thinking that says, "Wait a minute," to the idea of "optimization", which revives again and again like a ghost, as a non-centered = peripheral idea.

Motoe: The usability-first approach starts with the stipulation that "this is how human beings are".

Kubota: I think the idea of "normal" is dangerous. If we define something as normal, we give birth to abnormalities. “Center" and “normal" are dangerous words that inhibit ideas like diversity. The "new normal" after the COVID-19 is such an example. We need to imagine as flatly as possible what it is like to be different from ourselves and try to understand as little as possible.

New Wisdom to Coexist with the Incomprehensible

Nakanishi: I still remember an assignment given in Kubota-san's class that I took when I was your student. "Think about the image schema of jellyfish (*Cognitive semantics proposed by George Raykov and others: the idea that the occurrence of the meaning of words is based on physical experience [2])". Jellyfish don't have eyes, but they have light sensors in all directions. They also do not have an anus, so they expel unwanted substances through their mouths. If jellyfish with such a body structure had the ability to think, how would it think? That was all I could think about during the period leading up to the submission of the assignment, so I felt strange about the fact that it was bipedal and its eyes were attached to the front of its body.

Kubota: I chose jellyfish as an example of the incomprehensible because it is a creature with a structure in which the metaphors of "in front" and "above", which have strong influences on the way we humans think about things, have a diluted structure.  Since jellyfish have an axial symmetry body and are underwater, gravity has little effect on them, so we can imagine that it is difficult for them to have physical concepts of front and back or up and down. In the words we use in our daily lives, metaphors related to back and forth and up and down are latent, such as "moving the discussion forward," "the economy is rising," and "feeling down". I picked up jellyfish as an opportunity to make students aware of this.

Thinking about anthropocentrism is inextricably linked to thinking about what metaphors we are using. 

In James Bridle's "New Dark Age - The Technology and End of the Future,"[3] which I supervised in its Japanese version in 2018, he wrote that data should be viewed in terms of nuclear power metaphors rather than oil. Data was likened to the new oil because of its high availability. In today's age of social networking, however, data is more like nuclear power or radiation in that it is invisible and once uploaded, it cannot be erased again. Thus, our understanding of things is strongly dependent on the metaphors used. Therefore, knowing the limitations of our current metaphors and thinking of new metaphors would be a concrete way to awaken.

In this project, there are two metaphors “Fungi" and “Buddha", and one keyword “Smart City". It would be interesting to think of a new metaphor that connects these three words. What is a Smart City for Fungi, what is Buddha for Fungi, how does Buddha see Fungi...? It should be possible to think of metaphors that emerge from the combination of each. For example, if we assume that Smart City is representative of anthropocentrism, Fungi is representative of the faraway others, and Buddha is representative of the transcendent, what kind of similarity can we find among them? Such a thought-experimental approach is also possible. The concept of the ”Umwelt” is being reevaluated, and I think it is more important to deconstruct the umwelt and continue to move freely from one perspective to another.

When we think from non-human perspectives, the predictions of our future look like a lie. Because they represent a world in which most humans, especially ones who speak it, will survive. They are not predictions of the future, but only extensions of our current self-centered desires. The ability to predict can be seen as intelligence, but if so, intelligence is self-centered. Predicting the future from such a fundamental principle of intelligence, makes no sense at all. Instead of predicting the future, we should look more closely at the present. There are many realities that we still cannot see.

Nakanishi：In your book, you talk about the importance of maintaining a kind of ambiguity within oneself, such as uneasiness when one is obsessed with giving an answer. These future predictions are an act of asserting that you know what you don't really know.

Kubota: I think that both the person making the prediction and the person listening to it are doing so with a certain amount of conviction. If it is just for entertainment, there may not be much of a problem, but to affirm it in the fields of design, science and engineering is highly problematic.

Motoe: In the fields of business and politics, there are short-term gains, and the majority support those directions. We call it predicting the future to indicate a convenient way, but "design” should aim at something more long-term.

Reversal from Expansion, Revival from Decline

Motoe: In the kickoff discussion, we drew on Toshiki Sato's theory of the information society to discuss the concepts of "post" and "hyper”. He wrote that the trends in information society theory so far can be broadly classified into two categories: hyper, which talks about quantitative growth paths, and post, which talks about paradigm shifts. Recent discourse in the field of business and politics is all about the hyper, which talks about how to orient the current situation to survive and profit. However, the post is not discussed very seriously. This is because it is not directly related to one's own practical interests to seriously discuss a society in which one will not survive. In this project, we want to think about how to create an opportunity and context for serious discussion of “post”.

Kubota: When I heard that, I was reminded of McLuhan's tetrad. He argued that there are four essential laws of media: “reinforcement”, “decline”, “recovery” and “reversal”. What is interesting is that McLuhan said that these four directions are all interrelated. In other words, there is not just a simple axis of reinforcement and decline, but something that was in decline can be revived by the appearance of a new artifact, or it can begin to reverse itself when expansion goes too far.

For example, the Internet, which was reinforced and expanded in the belief that the world would be a freer and happier place if it could communicate with everyone on the planet, has now created further divisions by connecting too much of the world. The Internet is a clear example of a reversal caused by over-reinforcement.

The reason why the concept of tetrad is becoming more expansive is because the two axes intersect and expand as planes. A one-dimensional discussion on a single line can only go in a positive or negative direction, but with another axis, the thinking expands in a composite manner. Rather than thinking of post and hyper in contrast, I think one way is to draw on this idea of tetrad and think of hyper and post as being deeply related to each other.

Motoe: Perhaps it is wrong to simply contrast hyper and post and place them into a hostile relationship.

Kubota: Recently, I had the opportunity to look back at a video interview with Jaron Lanier, the founder of VR [4]. It was an interview from around 1997, when the Internet was still being greeted favorably, and he said that the Internet would dramatically change society, but that it was a mirror of human beings, and that not only good things but also bad things would surely happen. In addition, he said that by experiencing the bad aspects of the Internet, we can move on to the next stage, which will be a reversal to something better. Reversal from expansion and revival from decline might occur in the future.

The Possibility of Design Reversing Anthropocentrism

Nakanishi: At the end of "Design for Faraway Others," you write, "The post-human age will soon arrive, and designers must prepare for it. We have to reverse the fate of human-centered design". Shusaku Arakawa also uses the phrase "Tenmei-hanten" to say that we cannot go far unless we reverse the human nature of trying to create only what is comfortable.

Kubota: "Tenmei-hanten" is a translation of the English phrase "Reversible Destiny". If anthropocentrism is our destiny, reversible destiny may be to think about reversing anthropocentrism.

Most computer interface design is also focused on usability, but originally like human culture, alternative interfaces with diverse contexts could have coexisted. However, the explosion of devices such as smartphones has only narrowed that direction.

When I supervised the translation of “Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming” by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, I was struck by their belief in the possibilities of design [5]. Until now, the main purpose of design has been to make human life more pleasant and comfortable. However, design has many other possibilities. It should also be able to design actions that include things other than humans, so that the entire environment can coexist.

There was a long history of design before the concept of speculative design emerged. One of its ancestors is the Archigram. We need not only to appreciate what is new, but also to take another look at the history and accumulation of design to date and find a different meaning from what it was then. Looking near and looking far are never contradictory. Even at this point in time, we are still seeing a lot of discourse that is like a game of outlandish things, but I feel that this will cause us to miss what is really important.

[1] Akihiro Kubota, Design for Faraway Others, BNN Shinsha (2017).
[2] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Mataphors We Live By, Daishukan Shoten (1986).
[3] James Bridle, Akihiro Kubota (trans.), New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, NTT Publishing (2018).
[4] https://hive.ntticc.or.jp/contents/interview/lanier 
[5] Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Akihiro Kubota (supervisor), Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, BNN Shinsha (2015).

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