Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Fifth Generation

tags

Fifth Generation Project

On the American responses to 5GP, compare USTR's attacks on TRON

Notes

the FGCS as an interstice in the shift from a state-funded regime of American science organization to the neoliberal privatized regime of R&D now ascendant around the world.

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“arms race” in artificial intelligence (AI) between the U.S. and China

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the nation’s collective shock at the defeat of the reigning world champion of the boardgame Go by an American company’s AI program—described as China’s “Sputnik moment.”

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the U.S. military-industrial-university complex came to fear the project would produce AI systems capable of dominating the global economy.

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the Western AI programs were not “national projects” as had been conducted under the postwar state- funded and military-managed regime of R&D, but rather neoliberal proto- types for the commercialization of science and technology then underway.

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Fifth Generation offers a glimpse of what the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg calls an “alternative modernity,”

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Fifth Generation displayed many of the characteristics now described as essential to ethical, socially responsible AI.

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FGCS was deliberative, open, international, and oriented around public goods and the needs of laypeople.

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the fact that Americans perceived Japan’s Fifth Generation project as a threat presents a puzzle.

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that project’s success merely “attracted lively interest overseas,” and even gave “a substantial boost to the international prestige”

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While Japan wanted to harness technology as a public good, the United States understood AI as an impor- tant tool of geopolitical power

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In the West, the “information society” is an image equated with neolib- eralism, and information technologies are regarded as aids to coordinating the global marketplace.

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reallocate decision-making power from governments to markets, whose information-processing power is said to outstrip that of the state institutions

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Pacifist Japan would realize these ideals in ways the United States, with its relentless military- industrial war machine, never could.

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aspirational, even utopian goals

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the idea of a “fifth generation computer” occurred to Nakano, then only thirty, over a few heady afternoons discussing the next steps for the handful of sandal-clad programmers in their mid-twenties whom he oversaw in his capacity as a division chief for the fourth-generation VLSI Project.

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Because von Neumann architecture limits the processor to a single opera- tion at a time, FGCS project planners would later describe it as a “bottle- neck”

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cast their rejection of this American computer architecture in geopolitical terms: it offered Japan freedom from the “yoke” of perpetual competition with IBM, thus opening a new space for Japanese computing.

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users’ need for backward compatibility

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locked Japan into an endless cycle of imitation, closing off the path to Japanese innovation.

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he was not a pro- grammer, nor did he have a technical background

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rather than streamlining Japanese bureaucracy, com- puters were adding to it.

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computer language, where it was not numerical, was mostly English.

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he wanted to “make an unprecedented, new computer,” one that is “easy for anyone to use” because it “thinks like a human.”

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have a conversa- tion with the machine, in Japanese—freeing them from another yoke.

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a way forward for Japan to develop its own distinct-but-equal information society

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Though few understood the technical details, and many were skeptical of the project’s success, none of them wanted to be the one to kill this burgeoning Japanese Dream.

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not only information processing, but more importantly the creation of a state-sponsored public good.

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the UK and USA, perhaps because of their inability to bear the great burden of playing this role [as international leaders], have experienced a breakdown of industrial society that could be called, “UK sickness” (eikoku byō), or “USA-sickness,” (beikoku byō).

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whereas the United States and the United Kingdom had responded to social ills through neoliberal reforms, entrusting their cure to the power of markets, Japan would avoid “falling into their rut” by steering the domestic computing industry toward the production of socially beneficial computers

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computing would be a state- sponsored public good, rather than intellectual property to be patented and licensed

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spun off at public cost to private actors in what economist Mariana Mazzucato has called the “socialization of risk and privatization of rewards” process distinctive of Western neoliberal regimes.

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“stop playing ‘catch-up’ with the more advanced countries and to set goals of leadership and creativity in research and development

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will also provide our country with bargaining power.

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Free from military influence, the Fifth Generation better enacted the scientific norms that Americans described but rarely lived up to in their scientific practice.

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“increase productivity in low-productivity areas,” such as the service sector and small-scale manufacturing.

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augmenting, rather than re- placing, Japan’s primary resource, skilled human labor.

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the Japanese Dream of the Fifth Generation was not an “AI” project. It would not produce 人口知能 (jinkō chinō) or “artificial intelli- gence” as the concept had been imported from the United States.

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“expert systems,” the second major AI paradigm, which was introduced primarily by the American Edward Feigenbaum

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Expert systems were thus consistent with a fundamental tenet of neoliberalism— knowledge is a fungible commodity that retains its value after being abstracted from local contexts and formalized into computer code.

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designed for use mostly by businesses interested in eliminating the need for highly paid expert consultants.

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the planning committee saw ordinary people—rather than knowledge itself—as the primary source of economic value.

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“Quantum Jump in Friendliness.”

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our project is not an artificial intelligence project or an expert system project as wrongly understood by some people.

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in 1983, DARPA’s Robert Kahn could claim “LISP is the machine language of AI research.”

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Prolog is seen as somehow ‘un-American’—a European fad that has now been taken up by the Japanese.

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welcomed industry’s reduced role. It gave him a freer hand to build a unique culture

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researchers sent to ICOT were to be under thirty- five years old

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the ideal of R&D as a public good had already been displaced in the United States.

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alternative moder- nity in which R&D was conducted free from the enabling constraints of the military-industrial complex.

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frame the project as a modernization effort fully worthy of a mature, developed nation

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Westerners quickly perceived the Fifth Generation Computer Systems pro- ject as a threat to Western economic and computing hegemony.

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Nontrivial linguistic barriers between the Japanese hosts and their guests compounded the difficulty of communicating the Fifth Generation vision.

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paternalistic attitude and rhetorical portrayal of Japan as a “child” left the FGCS team cold.

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social goals interspersed alongside technical requirements for the society of the 1990s, perplexed many foreign attendees.

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arrived from the Occident to find Japan doing something high-tech, something advanced— something, perhaps, too complicated, too different for the world’s leading computer scientists to understand

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Instead of collaboration, “there was an urgent need for the U.K. to form its own fifth-generation computing strat- egy.

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adapted to British circumstances”—such as the neoliberal government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

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it was not a “national project” like Japan’s: Alvey broke with the post-WWII, state-led regime of science and technology R&D and adopted a neoliberal approach

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Japan’s FGCS was a direct challenge to American power and a threat to Western technological dominance.

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the global war had shifted to a new economic battlefield. And here was pacifist Japan, holding a sword

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Recognizing that these audiences no longer believed in either the promise of AI or in funding science and technology R&D as a public good, he instead capitalized on the threat that Japan—rather than the United States—would be the one to realize AI’s promise.

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consigning “our nation to the role of the first great postindustrial agrarian society.”

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pushing the global economy toward a “New Wealth of Nations,” in which the most powerful nations will no longer be those that commanded material resources, but those that could exploit knowledge.

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“establish a ‘knowledge industry’ in which knowledge itself will be a salable commodity like food and oil.”

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Reframed thus, the FGCS ironically became the ultimate neoliberal project.

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Japan threatened to undermine American dominance and disrupt the economic order

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not only is it in the national interest to do so, but it is essential to the national defense.

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for-profit industrial consortium of thirteen corporations, was founded in September 1983. Such consortia had been illegal before the neoliberal reforms undertaken during Reagan’s first term in office.

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the purported resemblance to the Japanese project was superficial; at the fundamental level of scientific ethos, they were nothing alike.

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the era of “reasoning machines is inevitable. It is the ‘manifest destiny’ of computing.”

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Feigenbaum did not list cooperation with the Japanese as one of the options

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Cooper confessed to trundling out the Japanese “as the arch-enemies” and using Feigenbaum’s threat narrative “unabashedly” in private conversations with congresspeople and senators.

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despite an exoteric aversion to government intervention in mar- kets, the esoteric core of neoliberalism holds that free markets do not arise organically but must be created by historical actors

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competition—military and market- based—linked everything together in a “closed world.”

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Alvey director Brian Oakley remarked, “‘It’s like some sort of warfare. . . . It’s strange that we should compete in this nationalistic way.”

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it was economic warfare; state-funded, market-driven competition between military allies

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Putin’s remark that “Whoever leads in AI will rule the world.”

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authoritarian China uses AI as an instrument of social control and repression.

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U.S. AI industry, led by some of the most profitable companies in modern history, remains thoroughly intertwined with the military.

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American consolidation of geopolit- ical power and the so-called “end of history”

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That the 1980s had been dominated by state-led national economies was overlooked as neoliberalism became the new common sense.

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a Catch-22: “we [initially] had to face criticism, based on that false image, that it was a reckless project trying to tackle impossible goals. Now we see criticism, from inside and outside the country, that the project has failed because it has been unable to realize those grand goals.”

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while the FGCS was called a “big failure” abroad, many Western nations attempted similar projects, and “all of them failed too.”

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The fact that economic payoff was never the goal, and that MITI considered the project a success on its own merits, did not matter.

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AI was so taboo that to even use the Japanese word for it (jinkō chinō) drew condemnation.

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my dream is to imagine that if the Web had appeared 15 years earlier, Japan would be sitting where Silicon Valley is right now

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the FGCS stands as a warning about the danger of hubris

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thought they could anticipate what the Japanese society of the 1990s would look like

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they—like most technocrats throughout history—were more or less wrong

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the most enduring symbol of the Japanese Information Society would not be the Fifth Generation, but the Nintendo

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