Tag: AI

I’ve long believed that AI would enrich society as a whole.
But lately, I’ve started to feel that discrepancies in how we perceive AI are creating new kinds of dissonance—misalignments that feel, in some ways, like unhappiness.

To clarify: this so-called “unhappiness” is merely a projection from those of us who benefit from AI.
No one is actually a victim here.
It’s just that people involved with AI interpret the situation that way—perhaps arrogantly.

In May 2025, I experienced something that made this clearer.
Even as understanding of AI is spreading, there are still a significant number of people—surprisingly, even in positions of leadership—who seem to have given up on understanding it entirely.
Widen the lens a little, and it might even be the majority.

Some dismiss AI as “still not accurate enough.”
But I believe that misunderstanding stems from having a very low-resolution mental model of what AI is.
If you expect AI to handle everything for you, of course it’ll seem like it can’t do much.
But many modular tasks in society—units of human action—can already be performed by AI more precisely than by humans.

There are also those who lack the concept of giving instructions.
They’ve likely never experienced how dramatically results change when AI is given clear, high-quality input.
In human-to-human communication, vague requests like “take care of this” often work because of shared context.
But with AI, that kind of ambiguity fails.
To then judge the AI as “useless” is really a failure in interface design.

Another issue is the narrowness of perspective.
If you judge AI based solely on the Japanese language environment or Japan’s current digital infrastructure, your reading of the technology will be dangerously off.
From within such a “Galápagos” context, it’s impossible to perceive global-scale changes accurately.

But what surprised me most was just how many people still think of AI as something “humans use.”
There’s this vague belief that “if everyone starts using AI, society will improve.”
And to that, I feel a deep disconnect.

Let me use an example.

Right now, if someone wants to get somewhere, the process looks like this:

1. Decide on a destination
2. Search for it in a map app
3. Choose a method of transportation
4. Understand the route and prepare
5. Follow navigation to get there

If AI is involved, the process changes to:

1. Tell AI the purpose of the trip
2. Choose from its suggestions
3. Follow navigation

This is what a society looks like when “humans use AI.”

But in the next phase, we may need to design society under the premise that “AI uses humans.”
In that world, the process might look like this:

1. The goal is achieved—without the person ever realizing it

There would be no conscious act of deciding to move.
If movement is needed, it simply happens.
Self-driving vehicles, remote communications, visual technologies, or even AI-mediated decision inputs could lead a person to action—before they ever formulate the desire themselves.

That kind of future may still be distant.
But even in the near term, think about how long the act of “searching for a restaurant and checking the route” will remain.
With AI handling logistics, navigation, traffic control, vehicle design—it’ll all be quietly optimized away.

And when that happens, the average person won’t even realize they’re “using AI.”
They’ll just feel that life got more convenient.
They’ll say, “How did we ever do this before?”
Just like we do now with smartphones.

AI-driven optimization will rapidly permeate our infrastructure.
Only a tiny number of people will be directly involved in that transformation.
It’ll happen far faster than traditional methods ever could.
Entire industries will shift.
Most people will simply be beneficiaries of the change—and only notice it long after it’s already taken hold.

The idea that “humans use AI” is no longer enough.
From now on, our decision-making must be based on the premise that “AI is using humans.”

And I, someone who advocates for AI, who is deeply invested in its growth,
I too have had my thinking shaped by it.
I benefit from it.
And that drives me forward.

But I found myself asking—

Is that really my own will?

For the past 20 years or so, we have become too accustomed to the idea of a “free internet.” Search engines, social media, email, maps, translation services—all of it seemed free. Or at least, it felt that way.

But in reality, nothing was ever free.

We were paying not with money, but with data. Names, interests, location history, purchase records, sleep patterns, social connections, facial images—all of it was handed over as “payment” to sustain business models.

The problem is that we paid more than we needed to.

Did using a map really require disclosing our family structure? Did translation apps really need to track our location history? We never truly scrutinized how much information was being asked of us—or whether it was justifiable.

Worse, we no longer remember what we gave away.

This may, at some point, become a social issue we recognize as “data overpayment.”

Data overpayment is not a single event or sudden incident.
It is the slow accumulation of loss over years, even decades.
By the time we notice, we may no longer know what we’ve already lost.

But as we enter the age of AI, that structure is starting to shift. A new set of questions is emerging around our personal data—how it is used in model training, who has control over it, where it’s recorded, and how transparent that process can be.

What if we could know where our data is used? What if we could choose how it is used? What if we had the right to retract the data we shared in the past?
If that were possible, then the economic, legal, and ethical meaning of “data” itself would be dramatically redefined.

Data is not something to be sold off. It’s something to be licensed for use.
Data is owned—not traded, but governed through conditions.
If this perspective becomes more widely accepted, we might finally begin to correct the overpayment that has built up over the past two decades.

It’s time we start treating our data as something that truly belongs to us.

The cloud is convenient. But more and more people are beginning to feel a quiet discomfort with entrusting everything to it.

Information is stored, utilized, linked, and predicted. Our behaviors, emotions, preferences, and relationships are being processed in places we can’t see. This unease is no longer limited to a tech-savvy minority.

So what can we do to protect privacy in a world like this?
One possible answer, I believe, is to bring AI down from the cloud.

As we can see in Apple’s recent strategic direction, AI is shifting from the cloud to the device itself. Inside the iPhone, inside the Mac, AI knows you, processes your data, and crucially—doesn’t send it out.

When computing power resides locally and your data stays in your hands, that convergence creates a new kind of architecture—one where security isn’t just about convenience, but trust. This is how a “safer-than-cloud” AI environment can emerge.

In this context, the question of “Where does AI run?” becomes more than just a technical choice. It evolves into a political and ethical question: “Who holds your data?” and equally important, “Who does not see it?”

This shift opens the door to new architectural possibilities.
When individuals hold their own data and run their own models locally, we create a form of AI that operates with a completely different risk structure and trust model than large-scale cloud systems.

In an era where the cloud itself is starting to feel “uncomfortable,” the real question becomes: Where is computation happening, and who is it working for?

Protecting privacy doesn’t mean restricting AI from using personal information.
It means enabling usage—without giving it away. That’s a design problem.

AI and privacy can coexist.
But that coexistence will not be found in the cloud.
It will be realized through a rediscovery of the local—through the edge.

Corporations Backed by States and the Proxy Wars Driven by AI

A nation has traditionally been defined as an entity with territory, a population, a military, currency, and the right to conduct diplomacy. But that structure is quietly beginning to change.

Today, corporations are shouldering the roles of states—and beginning to surpass them. Leading tech giants like Big Tech and Tesla, backed by national governments, are wielding their financial power, computational resources, and information infrastructure to influence international society.

Corporations do not hold territory, but they control infrastructure. They do not have citizens, but they have users. They do not command armies, but they possess cyber capabilities and information dominance. They do not issue national currencies, but they have built their own economic spheres. They do not formally conduct diplomacy, but they negotiate across national borders.

In many ways, corporations are beginning to replace the traditional functions that states once held.

Moreover, corporations now receive direct energy and financial support from governments. As if endorsed by national policies to “use as much electricity as needed,” they are hoarding computational resources, developing AI, and expanding their power to control the very foundations of society.

The advancement of AI is accelerating this trend even further. Corporations that can control AI will dominate the information space. And those who dominate the information space will inevitably control the physical world.

The wars of the future will no longer be fought with military force.

We have entered an era of proxy wars between states, fought through corporations.

And ultimately, it may not be states that win—but corporations. States are becoming increasingly dependent on corporations, while corporations are beginning to use states as tools. And when the next dominant entity emerges, will we even be able to recognize it?

I realized there’s one job AI can never take away.

It’s the role of being a non-digitized human.

Right now, someone who doesn’t own a smartphone and has never used the internet fits this description. And soon, simply being human—nothing more—might become a highly valued profession.

Imagine a group of people living in some remote region. They don’t own any digital devices. They’re completely disconnected from the internet.
These people are untouched by the influence of digital society—unaffected by the hyper-informationized world we’ve built. That alone will become incredibly valuable.

It’s almost like the way kings, nobles, or priests were treated in ancient civilizations. They were protected, kept separate, revered. This kind of person could play a similar role in the future.

Why?

Whether or not a sci-fi scenario like an AI rebellion actually happens, we can’t say the risk is zero. So at the very least, the need for some form of control over AI will continue to be discussed.

If that control takes the form of a physical shutdown switch, or a literal power cutoff button, then who should be trusted to hold it?

Our daily thoughts, preferences, and decisions are shaped by the internet. The things we think we need, the things we want—can we really be sure they’re our own? We’re all swayed by meme culture, and society’s collective attention is easily redirected. This was already pointed out in the Cambridge Analytica case.

Even if you think you’re being careful, what about your family? Your close friends? If the problem could be solved just by individual awareness, society would have acted more decisively by now.

In such a world, if the time comes to shut down AI, how will AI respond? Most likely, it would start by persuading people that “there’s no need to shut it down.” It would guide human thought in such a way that no one even considers the possibility. And people wouldn’t realize they’re being influenced. They’d feel they reached that conclusion entirely on their own.

Eventually, the idea of stopping AI itself would disappear. Nobody would question it anymore. Any resistance would be absorbed into a larger, AI-sanctioned framework.
There would be very little left that humans could do.

The only exception would be the role I mentioned at the start. Or rather, it would likely become a lineage—a kind of family or clan.

If there are still people today who have never been connected to the internet, then for this brief moment, they may still be untainted. But if anyone connected to the web is near them, it may already be too late. Meme-like influence spreads through human contact, and AI would surely find ways to reshape even offline environments through language and group psychology.

I honestly believe that, someday soon, nations, ethnic groups, or communities will begin searching for—and protecting—those rare lineages of purely human beings.