The Melting World

I was traveling all over Japan last week, not able to
participate much in the class forum. But I
did try the chat bots as well and was not impressed with
them. Darth Vader as a chat bot seemed annoying and very
stupid to me, I wonder if he ever guesses correctly?
My thought he was to discover was ‘humility’ and he guessed
‘ivory.’ I guess it rhymed at least:-). It could be start
of a poem.

Eliza was an interesting bot and for someone who can’t
afford a real therapist, she might serve to help someone
express his/her thoughts/feelings, albeit in a contrived
way, and not always useful. It seemed odd to call her a
her, when actually it seemed more like a conversation
with one’s self in a sense.

I wanted to share a bit on two things I learned over the
week in my travels.

1)I had an interview at a modern technology uni here in
Japan and saw blips of an emotional division between
so-called creative types (art, intercultural, creative
thinking skills–where I exist comfortably) and the
so-called hard science types (AI, robotics, fuzzy logic,
physics–where I’ve gained some comfort due to the studies
we are doing at UBC–Vancouver).

Oh, most people were not divisive at all, thank goodness.
Yet odd to say, I couldn’t quite see much logic in such
cold delineations myself. Certainly, different
skills/protocol are needed for success in these fields,
but many similar thinking processes are shared, too. I
argued the need for interdisciplinary work, which the
uni ‘officially’ is aiming for, but it seems there might
be resistance from the a few conservative hard-science
folks–a sort of visceral disdain (dislike?) for the
arts. I won’t know if I got the job until late July, but
my guess is that it hinges on whether I could convince
the conservative faction to understand my belief that
without creative thinking and a broadminded approach
in the study of technology and science, the cutting-edge
research could never occur. I don’t know if I won them
over, sigh, but that’s on me, not them.

2) At a Tokyo conference, I asked an Ainu activist, Koji Yuki,
about the new supplementary government-sponsored textbooks,
which spend 99% of the pages to ancient history of the Ainu
and 1.5 pages to recent activism and modern (ala 1980’s) life
of the Ainu. I asked how he felt of that sort of representation
of a living culture. He said it was odd for him to see
how the Japanese often portray the culture an antiquated
and/or dead/dying when he lives it every day. He said
growing up only one line was in his textbook: “The Ainu
were once in Hokkaido.” He saw the 1.5 pages as an
improvement. He said something powerful to me then:
rather than worrying about the info taught in textbooks,
he said he hoped that eventually children would learn
naturally from their parents and community the truth
about the Ainu and their living culture. This he saw as
his work. An admirable aim…