The Prologue of "Smart City, Fungi and Budda"

Photo by Rutpratheep Nilpchr on Unsplash

Our Purpose

In this note, we will archive discussions with people from various fields on the following topics as a project named "Smart City, Fungi and Buddha".

・Autonomous car, Robotics and AI
・Smart City and Landscape
・The future of design focused on post human-centered Design
・Multi-species Ethnography with various intelligence different from human
・The Art of thinking and living with objects beyond human intelligence

　The future is just around the corner when machine intelligence with mobility, such as autonomous cars, robots, and AI, will be all around us. What kind of environment will we be surrounded when they become a part of our lives even if they have simple and limited intelligence.

　Just before personal computer and the Internet spread around the world, lots of people discussed about how will these new tools and environments change humanity and what kind of human intelligence will they elicit?

　How should we design such a new environment surrounded by moving machine intelligence and live together with such an unfamiliar existence? What kind of physicality and intelligence will be drawn out of this environment, and how will new "human beings" be created? In this project, we will discuss with researchers or designers in various fields, and we hope that our discussions would work as a vehicle leading us to an alternative world.

Fungi and Buddha

　Fungi belongs to a class of fungi that are neither animals nor plants. The mycelium in the soil or tree is the main body of the fungi, and the mushroom is a kind of temporary form of the mycelium to release spores. A  research has shown that fungi can make decisions and remember things, and it has also been said that fungus are the largest organisms on earth. A simple and limited intelligence is networked and surrounds us, yet humanity cannot fully comprehend the totality of it. We see fungi as a symbol of such intelligence.

　Humans do not necessarily behave rationally. Various studies in behavioral economics show such experimental results. Herbert Simon pointed out the limits of rationality and is the origin of behavioral economics. However, if we change the scale of time and space, the basis of rationality changes. We see Buddha as a symbol of intelligence that transcendence from a human scale to a cosmic scale, and past, present, and future.

Project Background

　This project is a subproject of the research project "Symbiotic Interaction Infrastructure that Transcends Limited Rationality," which was adopted by JST CREST in the area of "Creation and Deployment of Core Technologies for Symbiotic Interaction between Human and Information Environments".

　Dr. Yasuto Nakanishi, a HCI researcher and a UX designer, one of the members of this project, studies dynamic spaces composed with non-anthropomorphic robots.

 　When as we interact with and live surrounded by mobile intelligent machines  of various shapes and sizes, how will our experiences of spaces or sense of values change? What kind of physicality and intelligence will they elicit? In this project, we would like to consider these questions in parallel with the design and development of furniture robots or robotic rides and research on human-robot interaction.

Project Members

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)
Osamu Shimizu (Editor)
Kotaro Okada (Editor)
Naruki Akiyoshi (Writer)
Momoko Yoshida (Translation)