Assessing the Japanese Turn in AI and Robot Ethics: Extracting Meaningful Principles Between Exoticism and Empiricism in the Case of AIBO

摘要

The present paper critically examines a recent recurrent pattern of Western scholarship of importing sets of Japanese ethics in artificial intelligence/data/robot ethics contexts without a deeper examination of their meaning and value. The paper's outline is unfolded as such: (1) We draw on material stemming from an ethnographic participant-observer study that followed a debate between Western and Japanese people confronting the robotic AI pet AIBO. (2) We demarcate how many of the proposed Japanese values are practically relevant to the examination of human-robot interaction and how this feeds into existing questions about privacy and safety, in the context of a global overwhelming AI hype and narrative bias. (3) Finally, we discuss how a long history of Western enthusiasm and occasional misunderstandings of Japanese values comes full circle with the recent trend, and we conclude with a set of open questions that require more dedicated empirical research in order to reach more proper and practical value system in the future design of technology.