Comparative Computer Culture

All right, then, delivering on a long-overdue promise (threat?), I hereby subject you to my translated essay on Japanese computer culture. I've changed as little as possible, but all parenthetical notes are not part of the original text. Like everything I write, this is backed by little or no scholarship, and all opinions are mine, as are all typos and awkward phrasings. Enjoy!

A comparison of PC culture: differences between Japan and the US in using and thinking about computers
Among present-day households in developed nations, not having a computer is as unusual as not having a telephone. School reports and authors' manuscripts alike are not handwritten but word-processed. With the assistance of the Internet, the Information Age is spreading. And at its forefront are the birthplace of computers, the United States, and the world's electronics manufacturer, Japan. But while computers are essential to daily life in both the US and Japan, their significance and use differ in some respects. I'd like to think a bit about how computers are used and thought about differently in the US and Japan, and about how this difference came about.

From the invention of the digital calculator in the 1940's, computers have become progressively more useful. Year by year the size of new computers decreases, while their computing power continues to grow. The first successful computer for personal use was perhaps the Apple II, released in the 1970's, and from then "PC" (in Japanese, "pasocon") has become a household word. Currently (as of May 2008) the US-based HP is the world's largest computer manufacturer, and Japan's Toshiba is estimated to be the fifth-largest. According to national census data, the fraction of the total population that uses computers is about 74% in both the US and Japan. In 1995, this number was 54% in the US, and 16% in Japan. In summary, PCs spread extremely rapidly, and over the past few decades have become an essential part of daily life.

That computers have become essential to modern life is certain, but what are they generally used to do? Word processing, games, finding information and socializing on the Internet, and various other uses have become commonplace. At work as well, computers are more likely to be used than not. These uses have spread to the US and Japan alike, but there are differences in their use, in particular due to cell phones. Japanese people may read their email, surf the web, and play games on their cells rather than owning PCs. On the other hand, American cell phones can generally not be used as anything other than phones. (Wow, yeah, this is a bit dated. I think the point still holds, though.) Thus, in Japan, some of the functions of PCs are taken over by cell phones.

We can also see differences in the impressions of personal computers in pop culture. The computers that appear in American movies are, to put it simply, "inhuman". The most well-known example of this tendency is perhaps 2001's HAL. Though at first he plays nice and asks to be considered as merely a tool, HAL ultimately betrays his human companions and is destroyed by them. We are left with the impression that were computers to be able to think for themselves, they would not be able to coexist with humanity. In Japanese pop culture, on the other hand, computers are generally depicted not as competing with humanity, but rather as being used by or helping humans. For instance, in the popular Serial Experiments Lain (yeah, you knew that was going to come up, didn't you), whenever the protagonist turns on her computer, she addresses it, saying "hello navi"* and interacting with it as with a friend. As for why this should be the case, one might say that in Japan, a computer's capabilities are considered less important than its effect on one's lifestyle.

It is difficult to summarize the various attitudes towards personal computers, but I believe that, speaking generally, in the US the focus is on the specs and uses of a computer, while in Japan the interface and influence on one's lifestyle are considered more important. To Japanese people, whether computers are simply tools or beings on the level of humans, the heart of the matter is how they can be incorporated into daily life. They seem to spend more time thinking about the circumstances surrounding computers and their relationships with people. Over the course of thirty years, personal computers were invented and have become ubiquitous. If computer technology continues its rapid advance, then perhaps Japan, where so much attention is paid to the interfaces of computers and their effects on everyday life, will be able to adapt more easily to that new technology.



Whew! Finished. A plea for clemency: this was originally written in a language not my first, and has been translated, imperfectly, by me. This is no excuse for the fact that my evidence does not actually justify my conclusion. Nonetheless, let me know what you think!





*Footnote: while it may be obvious in Japanese (where "navi" is now a common term for a GPS), it's not in English, so I'll point out that "navi" here is the name of the computer. And yes, that's where Link's fairy got her name too.

News from the front, part the last

So, one other thing I've learned about forum RPGs: they go a lot slower during the school year. I can't really blame them for this, since obviously people have things to do, though that's rarely stopped me (not something I'm particularly proud of). My own project seems to have died off for the moment (though that's mostly my fault), and even sites that had quite a few enthusiastic players posting several times a day over the summer are now lucky to get one or two a week. I suppose the lack of a regularly scheduled meeting time might also have something to do with this. Chalk it up as another disadvantage. So, my analysis for those interested: it's a fun way to kill time, meet internet people, practice writing, and get your RPG fix while school's out, but having a local group is hard to beat. Forum's still better than Skype, though. *glares at Skype*

One step closer to Rei Toei

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/yamahas-singing-robot-mee_n_312400.html

A few years ago, the world (or at least the internet) received its first real virtual idol in the form of Hatsune Miku. For those who don't know (it's been hard to miss if you read the internets), Miku is essentially two things -- an anime-style character, and a synthetic voice, both courtesy of Yamaha's Vocaloid software. Neither of these is particularly groundbreaking, but the combination somehow took off, and she's become an internet phenomenon. By dint of the Eliza effect, she's gained a projected personality and an enormous following; if you're curious, search for Hatsune Miku on youtube, and then don't blame me for the amount of time you spend watching. Now Yamaha's taken the next step by making a humanoid robot to go along with the Vocaloid software (surprisingly, it does not have green pigtails). World domination can't be far off.

The concept of a virtual idol has been around for quite a while now; I've traced it back as far as 1994, which I believe was the release year for both William Gibson's novel Idoru and the anime Macross Plus. Both stories center around AI singers who become international pop stars. This seems to have been pegged as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon; Gibson's Rei Toei is Japanese (idoru is roughly the Japanese word for idol) and of course Macross was written and produced in Japan. This could be partially a function of the era in which they were created -- in 1994, Japan was the leader in pretty much every area of technology -- but I think there's something more to it than that, as evinced by the fact that the first real virtual idol turned out to be Japanese after all. In my opinion, it might have something to do with the Japanese media's mastery of the art of characterization, about which more below. Japanese technology also has an unparalleled focus on the human element -- the focus is often less on the capabilities of a device (speech synthesis has been around for ages) than the interface and the way it's presented to the user. (I wrote a speech on this for class a couple years ago; if I can find it, maybe I'll post it and/or a translation.)

It's interesting to note that both Rei Toei and Sharon Apple 1) had AI-generated personalities, and 2) interacted with the "physical" world via hologram, whereas neither of these are true of Miku. These traits reflect the state of the art at the time -- in 1994, the internet had yet to really take off as a medium for media distribution, and Turing-test AI seemed not too far off. These days, AI as a field has basically collapsed (see earlier rants), and holograms are a dreadfully inefficient way to make a digital entity visible. Those two traits are both infeasible and, as Miku demonstrated, unnecessary. In particular, thanks to the effect first publicized by the infamous "ELIZA" psychologist program, there's no need for AI to create a personality for a character. Any program that displays even remotely humanoid traits will be assigned a personality by the people who interact with it. Her appearance and her voice are easily sufficient for people to decide that Miku is naive, energetic, a little clumsy, and so on, and countless other traits are ascribed to her by her legions of fans. This isn't all the Eliza effect, though; I think some thanks is also due to the incredible power of characterization that the anime style possesses, by which the smallest details of appearance encode a character's personality. (Look at me, tying all my previous posts together!)

I'm most decidedly not a futurist, so I'm not going to speculate about what comes next, though I will be absolutely amazed if a Miku robot doesn't follow close on the heels of this one. Are virtual idols the future of pop music? Well, someone still has to write the songs, but that's true for human idols as well. In fact, Miku has an advantage on that count, because her compositions are crowd-sourced: anyone with the software can write songs for her (and thousands have). The voices still need work, but Miku and her comrades are incredibly popular despite (because of?) the fact that they're obviously synthetic. Humanoid robots have largely fallen by the wayside everywhere except Japan, probably because they're not really useful for anything, but we may yet be surprised by how much difference it makes to have a physical object that looks like us. At any rate, it may be about time for me to sign up for the waiting list for tickets to the next Hatsune Miku or Rei Toei concert (I think I'll give Sharon Apple's a miss). I'll see you there!

Scientists Worry

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html?_r=1&ref=us

Okay, how could I resist? The New York Times runs an article with the headline "Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man". When I first saw it, I couldn't stop laughing. But it only gets better from there.

"A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously."

What in this has anything to do with intelligence? Opening doors, maybe. It at least requires a bit of coordination; cats can do it, but most fish can't (though there may be other reasons for that). Being hard to wipe out? Later in the article, viruses are described as having reached a "cockroach" stage because they can't be easily gotten rid of. Yeah, sort of like cockroaches, or, I don't know, viruses? The least intelligent (arguably) living organisms in existence? And killing autonomously -- viruses can do that too, as can every predatory creature in existence, no matter how dumb.

But what really takes the cake is the caption on the photo of a robot that can plug itself in when its batteries run low. I quote: "This personal robot plugs itself in when it needs a charge. Servant now, master later?"

Ahahahahaha! Sorry. I thought I was in a 60's B-movie for a second. I usually put a good deal of trust in the NYTimes to come up with stories about things that are important, or at least coherent. This time, they've really let their readers down. Which is a pity, because the second quarter of the article is actually somewhat meaningful. When they talk about what actual scientists are actually afraid of, it becomes clear that it's not about intelligence at all.

In fact, they're thinking about two main problems: first, the rather pedestrian worry that computers will take human jobs (it's happened before, it'll happen again, and we seem to have survived somehow); and second, the far more important concern that people will have difficulty adapting to advances in technology. This is really something worth writing an article about -- the idea that our current social structures won't stand up to rapidly advancing technology, AI or otherwise. It's the same problem the music industry has been struggling with for years now, without anything even remotely resembling intelligence involved (on either end, heh). They take the time to publish a few interesting questions the scientists came up with: "What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?" Unfortunately, they seem more interested in sounding alarms than actually answering these questions.

After this, the rest of the article is devoted to the usual singularity nonsense, which makes for great sensationalist reading (once) but doesn't really forward the dialogue here. I'm not really the person to pick up the ball the NYTimes dropped, but I'll at least say a little about the issues they should have been talking about.

Computer intelligence isn't really a concern here; in fact, as time goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the label "AI" exists only to impress and frighten the laypeople (for those who don't know, these days it's mostly statistics). Intelligence isn't the operative variable in determining whether or not a particular technological breakthrough causes societal problems. What matters is how it can be used in people's daily lives, to do things that are already possible differently and more efficiently. It doesn't matter how huge Google's database of personal information is if they don't have efficient algorithms to make sense out of all the numbers. A criminal can already simulate another person's voice with a vocoder or just a talent for imitation, so I'm not so worried about intelligent speech systems. Similarly, I'm not (yet) worried about Ray Kurzweil's singularity, because it's about a completely different mode of existence; it wouldn't so much clash with our society as rewrite it. Someone needs to think about these things, but they're blue-sky next to the real and present concerns (I won't say dangers) caused by any technological innovation that affects our way of life.

All right, enough of this rant. I hope the Times does a bit better next time they decide to cover a computer science conference. Really, very few of us take over the world for a living. I suppose I ought to thank them, though, for demonstrating that the infamous Frankenstein complex is alive and well in the modern age. Here's to more enlightened times; the singularity can't get here soon enough.


(Oh, by the way. This post came pretty quickly after the last one, but make sure to read that one too! It has important news and such.)

And the gates open

It turns out that making a forum site isn't as time-consuming as I thought. Acorn Rack really makes things easier. At any rate, after a brief flurry of industry, Steampunk Academy is now accepting applications! The actual story probably won't start moving for another day or two -- I'd like to get a sense of the sort of characters people are making and the sort of stories they'd like to tell -- but you can certainly make a character and socialize (IC or OOC). I'm pretty excited about this now; it looks like this project's actually going through! If you'd like any help with character creation or the like, just ask me (Glenn/Astell/Eleven/...). Hope to see you there!

The foundations are planted

Far more quickly than I expected, Steampunk Academy has a website. Please feel free to log on and look around; you can use the username guest and blank password. There's not much there yet at all, but I'm getting there, piece by piece. We're not quite to the point of accepting applications yet, so please don't submit one unless you'd like to help build the site; hopefully sometime during the weekend I'll have something a little more presentable. In the meantime, any advice or feedback on the site design is appreciated.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about some different approaches to character ownership. In a GM-less game (which this will be, by the way), the usual idea of NPCs doesn't really make sense -- if everyone's a player, every character is a player character. In other words, someone has to fill even the bit parts, so why not share the love? In the forum environment, it's particularly easy for one person to play multiple characters, since almost nothing is in realtime. So, this seems like a great opportunity to try giving everyone (or at least everyone who wants them) multiple roles.

I've been thinking of a sort of character auction system; when a new character comes up (someone's advisor, a rival club, the villain's flunky, a hall monitor), either the person who introduced the character can claim it, or it can be put up for grabs. Of course, we'd need some guidelines to prevent overloading and obvious conflicts of interest (you have first dibs on your family members, but not your mortal enemies), but in general I think it could be a lot of fun. Anyway, we'll see how it plays out; the odds that I'll have forgotten about this by next week are rapidly dropping. Stay tuned, and I hope to see you on campus soon!

A plan

So, I've been thinking (never a good sign) about the possibility of starting up a forum RPG of my own. It would probably be easier than running a game in person or over Skype (at least from a logistics perspective), and would be considerably easier than writing a rules-heavy game from scratch. Of course, this has perils of its own; among other things, it would be my first time running a forum of any sort, though I have a few veterans I might be able to ask for help. If I forget about it by next week, it won't be the first time, but I'm slightly more optimistic about this than most of my "projects".

Of course, it has to be steampunk. Recently I've been fixated on the idea of a steampunk academy, drawing inspiration from various institutions of higher learning both real and fictional. After all, the whole point of steampunk is research and invention, and what better place for that than a university? And it never hurts to write what you know.

I've given it the tentative title of PRAISE, for Polytechnic Research Academy and Institute of Science and Engineering (yes, it's long and redundant, but I like acronyms). It's huge, and full of everything an academy ought to have -- eccentric professors, cutting-edge lab equipment, political scheming, clubs for anything and everything, and so on. Combined with the loose timescale and concurrency of the forum approach, this seems like it'd open up potential for plenty of fun side stories and world building. Of course, I'd need a story too, or at least plot hooks. Give it time.

Anyway, this is obviously in the very early stages. I'll put things up here as I go (if I go), and I'll certainly link to it if the site itself ever comes into existence. Naturally, all my readers will be invited to join; I'd be glad to have you, whether you've roleplayed before or not. Feedback of any sort is always welcome, too. Low odds of completion aside, I'm pretty enthused about this right now. We'll see how it turns out.