Why Are Westerners Afraid of Robots, but Japanese Are Not?

Robots will take jobs away from workers in the future, destroy humanity, or rule over us – such and similar predictions make Westerners very skeptical about the development of artificial intelligence, to which they already set rules from the start.

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Those who are more tolerant are willing to accept them as assistants, toys, entertainment, or aids, thus viewing them as machines, a kind of lower beings to whom humans are superior.

However, the Japanese have a completely different attitude towards robots. They have long been part of the Japanese psyche, writes Wired, starting from the comic hero Astro Boy, whom they love so much that they officially named him a citizen of Niiza, which is no small thing, as any foreigner in that country will confirm.

The Japanese not only do not fear robots, but they also look forward to the idea that they could rule in the future. The reason for this may lie in a different culture, history, and religious beliefs. The national religion in Japan is Shintoism, which, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheism, does not consider humans to be that “special.” Instead, Shintoists believe that there is a spirit in everything (stones, houses, tools, empty spaces), something like the Force in ‘Star Wars,’ and nature does not belong to humans, but humans belong to nature.

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In the West, such beliefs are seen as childish, primitive, even bad. It was not always like this; Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari claims that “humanity” developed in our belief system when we stopped being hunters and gatherers and started to domesticate animals and plants, thus owning them, as was later the case with indigenous peoples during exploratory/conquest campaigns, and today the concept of ownership is tied to the economy.

Of course, this also applies in Japan, but the belief that everything around us has a spirit that needs to be respected has still been retained.

– Everything is connected; we do not see a difference between humans and the world around them. There is no resistance here, only quiet acceptance, says Japanese comic book artist Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy.

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The Western concept of humanism is limited, the text claims, and it is high time to question whether we should exploit the environment, animals, tools, or robots just because we are humans and they are not.