Civilization

  • Can AI Navigate the Chaotic Middle East with Theory Alone?

    Akio KAWATO Recently, “collaborating with AI” has become something of a trend. I decided to try it myself, using ChatGPT as a discussion partner to explore a question that has been bothering me: Is today’s tangled Middle East even something that can be meaningfully forecast? . This in fact is a question about methodology in international relations. Japan’s leading political…

  • How Japan Realized Economic Development 1: The Myth of the “Japanese Model”

    （Until the rise of South Korea and, later, China, Japan’s economic development was a major focus of attention for developing countries and former socialist nations seeking economic reform. This was because Japan was the only non-white country to have achieved industrialization.Although Japan’s economy is not currently attracting much global attention, there will likely come a time when interest returns. In…

  • In Japan innovations occur within companies rather than by loners

    Japan’s public broadcaster NHK airs a program called Project X. Each episode tells the story of people who joined forces to develop a new technology or build something remarkable—a massive dam, the QR Code, a lunar exploration robot (tiny ones), and many others. One of the pleasures of the program is that the people who actually did the work return…

  • The Hollowing Out of American Pop Music

    　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Akio KAWATO Lately, pop music in many advanced countries seems increasingly mechanical, standardized, and overly technological. It feels very different from the American pop music of the late 1960s—artists such as Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King—or from Japan’s City Pop scene of the 1980s, represented by artists such as Eiichi Ohtaki, Minako Yoshida, and Taeko Ohnuki. The…

  • Beyond the Anthropocene: Toward the Age of AI

    (I originally wrote this in December 2024, but I suspect the basic situation has not changed much since then.) Will ChatGPT Surpass Human Intelligence? — An Interview with ChatGPT While finishing the manuscript of my book In Search of the Lost Modernity, I relied quite a bit on ChatGPT. For example, I asked its opinion about one of the arguments…

  • A Sunshade for the Planet

    　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　.Akio KAWATO Summer is coming again, and with it the heat. After years of record-breaking temperatures, even COP—the annual United Nations climate conference—seems to be losing its sense of direction. The more desperately the world tries to cut CO₂ emissions, the more the thermometer appears to mock us by climbing ever higher. . As a result, some rather creative ideas…

  • Why Are Environmental Activists So Quiet in This Heat?

    It’s been scorching hot day after day. People say that if you fall on the pavement, you can suffer serious burns from the heat of the asphalt. Even the cicadas seem to have disappeared. These days, their larvae may be cooked underground before they ever emerge, and summer arrives with hardly a chirp. . Come to think of it, it’s…

  • The Summer Russia Chose Freedom

    . 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Akio KAWATO When people think of Russia today, they usually think of dictatorship, imperial ambitions, and the long shadow of Vladimir Putin. Yet there was a time when things looked very different. . After Mikhail Gorbachev launched his reforms in 1985, Soviet and Russian society began moving toward openness and democracy. That process reached its peak in August 1991,…

  • The Steakhouse in Delhi

    When people think of Delhi, one image that comes to mind—at least for those who visited 25 years ago—is that of cows. Sacred cows. White cows. They wandered calmly through the streets while rickshaws, motorcycles, three-wheelers, cars, and trucks squeezed past one another in every direction. It was Indian chaos at its finest. . Yet when I returned about five…

  • From Network-Centric Warfare to AI Warfare

    In the 1990s, under the guidance of thinkers such as Andrew Marshall and Arthur Cebrowski, the U.S. military developed an advanced operational concept known as Network-Centric Warfare. The idea was to connect large reconnaissance and strike drones such as the Predator, cruise missiles, ground forces, and other military assets through communications networks. Information from the battlefield would be gathered and…