This movie is full of nice quotes regarding tech and it's from 1995! Japanese people really have a fundamentally different view on tech, tech is always a tool. We Westerners love the classic Terminator plot, the classic Asimovs laws gone bad plot (I, Robot). The Japanese use tech, they sit in battle robots, they use it connect their consciousness directly to the internet. I love it.
Ok, some more from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, fully off topic but hey I'm getting pretty fired up, I'm going to watch both movies again really soon... The movies are so timeless because they don't focus on exact tech, they focus on the philosophical implications of the tech, it keeps them highly relevant.
Scene 9: Golden Sky
(In a vehicle flying across the remains of a city)
Batou: "This is one of the largest cities in the Kureal Islands, it was once prosperous, originally built to be one of the most important information centers in the Far East. See those towers? This city was really something. But its dubious sovereignty has made it the ideal haven for multi-nationals cooperations and the criminal elements that feed off their spoils. It's now a lawless zone, beyond the reach of the e-police. Reminds me of the line, 'What the body creates, is as much an expression of DNA as the body itself.'"
Togusa: "Doesn't that apply to beaver dams and spider webs as well?"
Batou: "If the essence of life is information that is carried in DNA, then society and civilisation are just collossal memory storage systems, and a metropolis is simply a sprawling external memory."
Togusa: "As it says in the bible. 'How great is the sum of all thy thoughts. If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand.'"
Batou: "Psalms 139, Old Testament. The way you spontaneous spout these ancient exotic references, I'd say your own external memory's pretty twisted."
Togusa: "Look who's talking."
Speaker: "Sorry to interrupt, but we're about to fly over Locus Solus. I'm changing the route just for you, so take a good look."
Speaker: "So much for the free tour. Now prepare for landing."
Togusa: "'His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced / Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks'"
Batou: "Now you're quoting Milton, but we are not Satan."
You're kidding yourself if you think the Japanese are above a good old-fashioned AI gone rogue plot. Exhibit A: Macross Plus (and the AI is an idol singer to boot). Exhibit B: GitS itself, with the Puppetmaster.
As for "Asimov's Three Laws gone wrong", Asimov himself created the Three Laws because he thought Frankenstein had been retold too many times and wanted to write stories about robots blending into human society rather than attempting to overthrow it (and imagined interesting new failure modes of these robots in the process!).
> Japanese people really have a fundamentally different view on tech, tech is always a tool. We Westerners love the classic Terminator plot, the classic Asimovs laws gone bad plot (I, Robot). The Japanese use* tech, they sit in battle robots, they use it connect their consciousness directly to the internet. I love it.*
I think your conclusion is correct in the sense that the Japanese use tech enthusiastically, but very wrong in the assumption that the reason is that they just view it as a tool. If anything, they seem to anthropomorphize a lot more than Westerners. I once attended a lecture by a Japanese professor researching robotics who basically seemed to live by the idea that if his robots looked and appeared to behave human enough, they would magically "be" human. It made it look like the anthropomorphization of robots its perfectly normal even on academic levels over there. Also, note how until Boston Dynamics, the majority of (research) robots that resemble humans or animals came from Japan.
But paradoxically, I think the reason is that they view tech less like a tool - all things have spirits in Japanese Shintoism, right? Perhaps therein lies the paradox: maybe due to this, the idea of AI becoming self-aware is less scary - objects are already treated as having a "spirit" anyway!
I think the story of Roujin Z contains a very interesting example of this[0]. An old man becomes (unwilling) part of an experiment for robots designed to take care of the elderly. The robot then becomes a rampaging AI, which turns out to be because it's secretly a government experiment for re-arming Japan. Due to uploading the voice of the wife deceased of the old man, the AI also takes on the persona and becomes a caring (but still rampaging) AI.
Let me emphasize: only the old lady's voice is uploaded - which important because it implies anthropomorphized magical thinking: like Zhang's dragon coming to life when he gave it eyes[1], giving the AI the voice of a sweet old lady magically made it a sweet old lady.
So if we go back to generalising, I think the difference is that Westerners fear tech, with stories of AI turning against us, while Japanese people consider it a potential new friend. Making them much more enthusiastic about new technology.
They were NSA employees and IBM engineers. There are no blanket prohibitions on travel for NSA folks, although I believe there are more or less 'don't go there' advisories about specific places. I also imagine there are folks there who know things that put them in special travel categories.
I don't think the IBMers had any special conditions imposed on them.
