2025-09-27
You have surely seen scenes in science fiction where people commune with dogs and cats and exchange words with them. Or you might picture a humanoid robot debating alongside humans.
What such depictions point to is the possibility of dialogue with beings unlike ourselves.
Talking to animals is not unusual at all. We speak to them hoping for a response, and read their gestures and expressions.
What about talking to machines, then?
That, too, is nothing special. An engineer working in a factory asks a machine, "How are you doing today?" and reads its condition from a faint abnormal sound or vibration. Listening closely, sensing that something is off—this can rightly be called a dialogue.
What if this dialogue could go deeper, to something like, "Hey, machine, what do you make of things on the floor lately?" The machine's experience as data, which human intuition cannot grasp, would overlap with the engineer's experience as know-how. By complementing each other and engaging in genuine dialogue, ideas would expand, and ways to improve and innovate that were invisible until now would come into view.
The human field of vision is surprisingly narrow. We understand the world by relying on our own senses and experience. We treat what we cannot see as "nonexistent," and faced with a different world, we write it off as "another world" altogether. But that is not because the other is alien; it is because our own cognition is closed.
The German biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll understood the world through the concept of the Umwelt. Every living thing lives in a world enclosed by its own particular senses. Bats read the world through echoes, bees through ultraviolet light, dogs through smell. Each Umwelt is fundamentally different, yet we mistake our own for the world itself.
Even so, humans have connected the differing perspectives of one another. Those intersections give rise to new discoveries and push human history forward.
Could we, then, borrow perspectives not from living things but from artifacts?
Microscopes and telescopes reveal realms beyond the reach of the naked eye. They push out the boundaries of the human Umwelt and help us touch the contours of other Umwelten. Yet what they show is always an image translated for humans; they cannot take us beyond our own Umwelt.
AI computation reveals patterns that human intuition cannot notice. Land and real estate remain in place across human generations. By borrowing such long senses of time, we might gain long-term insights that go beyond society and the economy.
To borrow another's perspective is to expand one's own Umwelt. So we look in, we learn, and having borrowed, we must give back. Borrowing is not a temporary act but an incorporation that carries responsibility. How we handle a borrowed perspective is up to us. To give back is nothing other than to offer it as a response, or as new knowledge.
There is an animistic sensibility at work here. Since ancient times, we in Japan have valued showing respect to objects and beings, sensing that even things deserve care, and not treating them carelessly. The same should apply to artifacts.
Rather than simply using machines and discarding them, we respond to the perspectives we borrow and value our relationship with them. That is precisely why I dislike attitudes like kicking a humanoid robot. It is not merely because it might break. It is because it feels like an act that severs a relationship and tramples on respect.
Borrowed perspectives make new abstractions possible. As long as we stay closed within a single Umwelt, the abstractions born there can only have narrow outlines; but by layering multiple perspectives, thought is lifted to a higher level, and unseen patterns and new connections emerge.
Once we start thinking about the Umwelt of artifacts, the human-centered worldview begins to waver. We may be overwhelmed by the time scales of nature and things, or feel uneasy about finding agency in artifacts such as AI. It is an experience accompanied by anxiety, but it is also an occasion to question once more the role of humans.
If there is one clear role, it is that only humans ultimately bear responsibility. We can borrow perspectives from artifacts, but only humans can take on the consequences that arise from them. Perhaps our role is not to be the protagonists of creation, but to be the ones who, in the end, take responsibility.
To broaden one's perspective is to perceive the world in many layers and to break out of a narrow, human-only shell. Through overlapping, our cognition extends more widely and deeply than before.
Sensor and AI technologies, like new telescopes, show us fragments of other worlds. They are tools that push out the human Umwelt, and what we see through them is no more than a translated image. But there are worlds we can touch only through those images.
In dialogue with diverse beings, what kind of world will we shape?