Ainu and Bears, the Public and AI

Recently, I’ve become hooked on a manga and anime called “Golden Kamuy.”

The story is interesting, of course, but I really like the fact that it has properly researched Ainu culture and accurately reflects it. (I don’t know much about Ainu culture myself, due to my grandfather’s influence, but I quite like it.)

In this work, the “bear” is one of the key items. Not only do they help people by providing meat and fur, but they also play a role in rapidly developing the story by attacking and sometimes killing people. Many people probably already know that bears are important gods to the Ainu, but the heroine, an Ainu girl,

“The Ainu believe that bears are not killed by force, but rather come to us to be killed when they are hungry.”

” he says, talking about the Ainu way of thinking. The protagonist is a little confused by this story. I think most readers, including myself, will feel uncomfortable and think, “What kind of way of thinking is that?!”

However, I remember a similar sense of discomfort.

It’s the strange feeling you get when you see “AI-equipped” advertising slogans for razors or air conditioners.

It depends on how you define AI, but for anyone with some experience with machine learning or deep learning, it’s just an algorithm. It probably doesn’t “learn” much But such things are praised and purchased as AI. I felt that something similar to this sense of incongruity exists between the Ainu and us.

Why do we feel uncomfortable with the Ainu way of thinking?

I think that’s because, in a way, we think about bears “scientifically” – that they’re not gods, they’re felines, and natural selection would occur and it’s impossible for them to offer themselves up to us.

On the other hand, the Ainu don’t know any of this. For them, reality and how they perceive it is everything.

In other words, while we look at bears from a creator’s or developer’s perspective, the Ainu take a thoroughly user-oriented approach. Bringing this back to the AI ​​story, for the general public, the sensations and reality they experience when confronted with a computer are everything. They don’t care about learning. It’s all about the user’s perspective. In that sense, AI for the masses is.

 What a surprise when a computer thinks like you

I think it can be defined as: In other words, when you shave your beard nicely or run the air conditioner nicely, the public is impressed that “AI is in it,” and this impression is what AI is. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what algorithm is in it.

Unlike previous technologies, AI technology has the ability to replace human roles by going beyond the category of a tool that can “recognize and create things (to a certain extent) plastically.” (The same is true of blockchain, which adds value to digital objects .)