Episode 33: Is Your Future "Scary" or " Exciting"?
(January 27, 2018)
Teruyuki Fujita, University of Tsukuba
All living creatures, not just humans, live under the law of self-preservation.
We never want to make our present condition worse in any way. At the least,
we want to secure a way to maintain our current situation and be at ease.
Human history, especially the history of conflicts and wars, is a typical
example. If something alien attempts to invade, we make every effort to
defeat it and assimilate it into ourselves. This is the basic form of war.
Even if no invasion is attempted, there have been countless wars started
by the desire to turn the surrounding area into the same color as their
own.
The living creatures probably have been given such a destiny in their DNAs. Driven by the DNAs to produce offspring with characteristics as close to themselves as possible, trees and grasses pass pollen and seeds to insects and birds, or let the wind carry them away. Animals also engage in copulation and mating behavior. When these needs for self-preservation are threatened, we become anxious and fearful. It is quite a natural emotional response. The ultimate outcome of such fear is, of course, the end of self-preservation, that is, death.
That's why the future can sometimes be nearly as scary as death. No one
has ever experienced the future, so there is no guarantee that our craving
for self-preservation will be satisfied there.
✽
Of course, in certain situations where social transformation is occurring stably and predictably, we can feel safe for the time being. The post-war economic growth in Japan started in the late 50s is a good example of this. The principles of mass production and mass consumption were assumed unchanging, and within the framework of these rules, we have devised measures for self-preservation while anticipating possible changes and implementing controls that we feel desirable and comfortable with. In such a case, the future is not so scary. On contrary, it had been fun and exciting to envision the future during the steady economic growth that lasted until the early 90s in Japan.
However, we are now facing an uncertain future, represented by the rapid development of AI and the unstable international situations. In such times, looking into the future makes us feel unsettled. We become anxious not because of specific unfavorable events, but because we do not know what will happen. And the quickest course of action for someone driven by anxiety is to avoid the factors that threaten their self-preservation. Simply put, it is to protect oneself from "anything negative".
When it comes to protecting ourselves from "something negative", we can only imagine what we have experienced in the past. We guard ourselves against the negative things we have experienced from happening again. We list up all the negative events we can recall and thus amplify our anxiety and fear.
At times like this, it is a typical human reaction to try to stop the progress of AI, even though we know it is impossible, or to choose not to utilize it, as the Japanese saying goes "The spirit you do not approach will not curse you." But, these are the same choices that textile workers in 1810s England made to destroy their weaving looms because they feared the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution. It is also comparable to deciding not to step out of your house to avoid a car accident.
✽
Here, we should reaffirm that our predecessors have overcome many drastic social transformations that are equivalent to or even surpass the development of AI and the destabilization of the international situation today.
In recent years, it has been pointed out that the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with IoT, big data, and AI as keywords, will surely occur, and that the arrival of the singularity is not far off, the turning point of an era in which AI will replace humans in controlling the progress of science and technology. Under these circumstances, many of us find ourselves in a situation where we share the fear that AI will displace our jobs. However, we need to calm down and reflect. What is being pointed out is the "Fourth" Industrial Revolution preceded by the first, second, and third ones; in other words, humans have already created and overcome these major transitions. Our predecessors survived the First Industrial Revolution (the mechanization of factories using water and steam engines since the end of the 18th century), the Second Industrial Revolution (the mass production using electricity based on the division of labor in the early 20th century), and the Third Industrial Revolution (the further automation using electronics and information technology since the early 1970s) and created a new society afterward.
Today, after going through all this, we tend to think that the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring about social transformation on a far greater scale than the previous smaller ones, but this is a paranoid idea. If this were not the case, it would be impossible to explain the actions of the workers who destroyed looms without fear of being charged with death in early 19th century England.
Even if we look only at Japan's modern history, there were transformations that radically changed the structure of society, such as the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century, the defeat in World War II, and the subsequent reforms during allied nations' occupation. For example, the death toll from World War II was in the tens of millions worldwide, and more than 3 million in Japan alone. After such sacrifices, the defeated countries, including Japan, rapidly underwent reforms that rewrote the entire political, economic, and social systems.
Furthermore, if we take a closer look at our daily lives in Japan, for example, the household dissemination rate of black-and-white TVs, which was 7.8% in 1957, exceeded 60% four years later in 1961 and reached 90% in 1965. In less than a decade, television broadcasting, which initially had been enjoyed only by less than 10% of affluent households, had penetrated into an overwhelming majority. It truly was an information revolution.
Our predecessors have adapted to these social transformations, created
new values and systems, and continued to innovate. What our predecessors
were able to do, I am sure we can do as well.
✽
The future is inherently scary for us. We don't know what will happen there, and there may be things in it that threaten our desire for self-preservation. But all of our fears and anxieties towards the future have not yet occurred, and they do not exist. They are just assumptions and speculations that we have made based on our past experiences. We can change the images we have created in any way we want.
We need to help children establish the mindset to always think of a set of strategies to prevent "anything negative" from happening in the uncertain future and to proactively respond to it if it does happen, in other words, to transform a crisis into an opportunity.
The first step is for us adults to change if we want to enable as many children as possible to acquire such a mindset through career education. The most powerful "teaching materials" in career education practices are role models.
While we adults are constantly pessimistic, saying that the future is scary, gloomy, and jobs will disappear ......, the possibility that our future will turn out that way will only increase. This thinking will spread to our children, and may even close their doors to the future.
Will we remain in the dark afraid of the future, or seek further wisdom to make it exciting? It is up to us to decide. Of course, I myself as well as each one of you, the readers, are a part.
(Translated and uploaded on September 18, 2021)
Click to read the current episode of Just Mumbling around Career Education series:
English version
Original Japanese version