ロボットが憐憫と恐怖の対象？

Cultural differences shade reactions to robots
BY PHILIP BRASOR
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES

In Western popular culture, robots are the objects of pity or fear, and no less an expert on the subject than physicist Stephen Hawking, who due to a disability has to communicate through a computer program, has commented that artificial intelligence could end up being a threat to mankind, an opinion that won’t find much traction in Japan, where robots depicted in the arts are almost always helpful, and willingly so.

Bestowing a will onto robots may sound like a dramatic device, but Japan’s tendency to imbue machines with sentient qualities reflects certain native religious precepts, which hold that everything has a spiritual component. You are a god and so is that tree. So is that pencil case, for that matter. It’s easier for Japanese people to accept an inanimate object as containing a soul, like all the singing, dancing flatware in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” It’s why the user’s manual for the toaster you just bought in Akihabara depicts the appliance with a thermometer in its mouth when it’s out of order. It’s also why dolphins can be simultaneously cute and delicious.

Thanks to classic anime like Osamu Tezuka’s “Tetsuwan Atom” (“Astro Boy”), robots have a sentimental purchase on the Japanese imagination. Last week, Nippon TV broadcast its annual robot combat special, in which teams of professional and amateur engineers build fighting machines to do battle in a boxing ring. The creators are men who grew up with what one of them called “the romance of robots,” and many are made to look like the heroic androids in Showa Era TV cartoons.

私などは、鉄腕アトムや鉄人２８号、マジンガーZと生きてきたせいか、ロボットは人間に奉仕してくれるヒーローのイメージが強いわけであるが、西洋では、憐憫あるいは、恐れの対象であるそうなーーー逆にそっち観念の方がわかりにくい。

筆者は、それを日本のアニミズムにも根付いているのではないか、という。ロボットに霊が宿り感情があっても不思議ではない、というわけである。