In this ALIGN webinar, we invited Hirotaka Osawa, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University.
His research covers human-agent interaction and artificial intelligence, and he is a leading figure in the study of science fiction as a method for innovation. He has been the 21st president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan since 2022, and he also directs Keio University’s center for science fiction research, development and implementation, founded in 2024. In April 2024 he supervised and edited AI o unda 100 no SF (Hayakawa Shinsho), a book that examines in detail how science fiction influenced AI researchers.
He shared his analysis of how science fiction has depicted future AI, especially AI risks such as malicious use, AI development races, organizational risks and rogue AI. With the participants, we then discussed what we can learn from these depictions, and what debates about the future of AI the work of leading contemporary science fiction writers, such as Ted Chiang, can open up. The webinar was held in Japanese on Zoom.