Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not | WIRED

“We have a strong negative emotional response when someone kicks or abuses a robot—in one of the many gripping examples Darling cites in her paper, a US military officer called off a test using a leggy robot to detonate and clear minefields because he thought it was inhumane. This is a kind of anthropomorphization, and, conversely, we should think about what effect abusing a robot has on the abusing human.”

“The Western concept of “humanity” is limited, and I think it’s time to seriously question whether we have the right to exploit the environment, animals, tools, or robots simply because we’re human and they are not.

SOMETIME IN THE late 1980s, I participated in a meeting organized by the Honda Foundation in which a Japanese professor—I can’t remember his name—made the case that the Japanese had more success integrating robots into society because of their country’s indigenous Shinto religion, which remains the official national religion of Japan.

Followers of Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and the Greeks before them, do not believe that humans are particularly “special.” Instead, there are spirits in everything, rather like the Force in Star Wars. Nature doesn’t belong to us, we belong to Nature, and spirits live in everything, including rocks, tools, homes, and even empty spaces.”

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via Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not | WIRED
image via and thanks Pixabay, TheDigitalArtist

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