Anime

Only one rule but a very important one.

Seventh of 12 entries for this year’s “Twelve Moments in Anime” Project.

Earlier this week I watched Time of Eve, a net series that has gotten a fair amount of praise. I enjoyed it as another of Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s projects about how future humans might relate to technology (I wrote favorably about Pale Cocoon in 2007) but there was a roughness that perhaps the re-edited film version will help smoothen, although I don’t want *everything* to be explained – I believe in the audience’s potential to put pieces together. A deeper reason why I liked it was that it made me think about what opinion I might hold if I had grown up in that speculative future.

I don’t want to get into particulars because I think each potential viewer should go into it fresh but it took a while for me to like the two male protagonists, though I suspect that may have been intentional on Yoshiura’s part. Both of them begin with particular ideas about how androids should be treated by humans and I held a different position: that they shouldn’t be treated differently, at least within the titular cafe. So, I often identified with Nagi, the kind cafe owner.

I immediately grafted on the cafe’s rule once I saw it because 1) that’s the ground rule so potential customers should just deal with it and 2) rather than thinking it was a frustrating rule like the two guys did, I thought it allowed for the best experience for both human and android visitors to enjoy themselves. I wondered why did the guys had to be suspicious about whether some customer was human or not, even though I knew I was unconsciously doing the same thing as I tend to analyze or think ahead while I watch many things.

Now, if I had grown up in that time and thus lacked the cultural acceptances I formed from reading various science fiction works and from being a general tech nerd, would I have had the same open feeling? There is a chance that I might because I hope I would be respectful and appreciative toward android aides if I interacted with them on a regular basis (possibly from a youthful optimism?) but I can’t be entirely certain as it’s a hypothetical and I don’t know what caused the “just a robot” general sentiment in this world. The whole master-servant dynamic feels strange to me in general so if I had that same uncomfortable feeling in that fictional world, maybe I would be more on Nagi’s side. Again, I can’t be sure how I would act because it’s a “what if” situation.

(An aside: in that world, how much has the population aged in Japan and what has happened to the birth rate? House droids would seem to be helpful to the older generation – similar to the currently projected initial implementations of “helping robot” technologies.)

While typing out an initial draft of what I wanted to say, a connection occurred in my brain between the desire of the house androids to freely express themselves unbound by their societal restrictions and a similar desire in people who cannot easily communicate their feelings. Recently it was reported that a man named Rom Houben woke up from a 23-year coma and claimed to have had some awareness around him the whole time. There is some debate as whether he actually had locked-in syndrome but let’s assume he was for the sake of my point.

I would rather not be in either position – a servant android with overrides or a person who unable to let his feelings be known – because both are frightening to me as someone who has been able to freely make decisions for the most part but still, I thought about what if I were. In both scenarios, I would be assumably be able to know the feelings of those who interacted with me although as an android, I’d be able to converse with my masters – unless there was some prior restriction preventing me, of course. I am sure that I would have loyalty to masters imprinted on me and probably be fine with that except it would be emotionally painful (do those words even work in this situation?) to be treated like dirt and not be able to easily talk back. As I mentioned a few paragraphs earlier, I don’t like the master-servant dynamic – from both sides of the coin.

AI is still in its early stages of development so it’s difficult for me to be sure how I – back to being a human now –  would act when dealing with a humanoid machine that truly learned patterns and cared for people. I do know there will very likely be an human-focused interest group like the Ethics Committee, whose collective mission could be an allusion to present-day anti-immigration groups, asking in television ads whether you would want to eat food grown by robots. My opinion in this might be affected by an incident that happened in the past and caused changes in public opinion about the use and regulation of robots.

(I now hate Asimov’s three laws a bit more after watching ToE, particularly if it is going to be a core element in any robot case law. Oh man, I am not looking forward to the time when statutes of that sort will first be codified.)

I admit this is kind of a mess but I hope you somehow grasped what I got out of this net series. I recommend checking it out if you’re interested in human-android interaction stories and particularly if you liked Pale Cocoon for the visuals (I’d like to see the Blu-Ray version). Even if you don’t decide to watch the show, you should at least take a look at something Alex Leavitt wrote about Time of Eve‘s production and publication for MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium blog.