The new era of Evocative Machines. Why you’re going to love it.

We speculate a lot about our future "robot servants" or "robot masters", but that whole metaphor is wrong. It's not going to happen that way.

This is a very personal and rather speculative episode. No guests this time. It's just the two of us.

In past episodes, you have already met some of the founders at the center of an amazing cluster of startups that have the potential to redefine the way humanity interacts with machines.

Evocative Machines is a uniquely Japanese approach that has universal appeal, and I guarantee you that it's not what you expect.

So let’s get right to it.

Links from the Founder

Everything you ever wanted to know Evocative Machines Some evocative machines mentioned in this episode

The GrooveX Lovot and Kaname's interview Yukai's Bocco and Shunsuke's interview Gatebox's Hikari (We'll have to get these guys on the show!)

Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Once again, I’ve got a special show for you today. There will be no guests no playful banter with someone speaking English as a second language. Today, it’s just you and me. Today we’ll be diving deep into a specific and unique area of Japanese innovation. There is something interesting happening in Japan, a cluster of startups working on something new. You’ve heard parts of it on past episodes, but today we are going into new and unknown territory, and I for one *love* being in new and unknown territory. It’s a trend I first talked about on Disrupting Japan a few years ago as Evocative Machines. Evocative Machines is a unique Japanese technology emerging from the nexus of artificial intelligence, robotics, and healthcare, and it is something that could utterly transform our world. It’s a technology that could birth a dozen Japanese unicorns, but we are at such an early stage and this is such a moonshot, it might not result in any at all. But a lot has changed since I first talked with you about Evocative Machines, so today I’ll explain the technology and its importance, bring you fully up to date, and then we’ll pull out our crystal balls and predict how evocative machines might actually change the world. Now, at the end of this podcast, I predict that 50% of our listeners will find what I am about to explain as interesting, but not important, another 40% will consider it important, but unlikely and impractical. And maybe 10% of you will understand that this is going to change the world and will want to be a part of it. And for those10% of you, I’ll provide a way for you to get in touch. There are amazing things about to happen.

Building an Evocative Machine So what exactly is an “evocative machine”? Machines are unquestionably becoming smarter, and recently there is a lot of good work being done on creating empathetic machines. But an “evocative machine” is quite different from an empathetic machine. The distinction is that empathetic machines are those that can understand our emotions and empathize with us. Evocative machines, on the other hand, are those which evoke emotions in us. Evocative machines are machines that cause us to empathize with them. So why is this useful, let alone disruptive or transformative? The whole point of automation is to get things done more simply. I don’t want to feel sorry for my refrigerator when it breaks down. I don’t want to sympathize with my microwave about how hard it’s working when it heats my dinner. Life is stressful enough. Why waste our emotional energy on inanimate objects? Well, when you focus on a single task, that line of thinking is absolutely correct. But you know something? The Western approach to automation, AI, and robotics is hurting society. It’s grinding us down without us even realizing it, and Japan’s newly emerging evocative machines are the solution to this problem that we haven’t completely realized we have, and it’s going to change the world. The history of industrialization and of modern prosperity is very much the history of automation. We would much rather use an ATM, or better yet an app, rather than a stand in line, and talk to a teller to make a deposit. And, although it was not the case a few generations ago, today we are all perfectly capable of operating our own elevators and pumping our own gas. And 10 years from now, we will all probably have gotten used to self-checkout and self-bagging at grocery stores, or maybe the home-delivery trends that accelerated during the pandemic will continue and we’ll just order our groceries from our phones. Automation makes us all more efficient. It lets us do more with less. But, you now, we also lose something. And what we lose is important. I don’t mind buying things from vending machines or using self-checkout. And the whole e-commerce and mobile commerce revolutions have been amazing. We do get a lot more for a lot less. Adding people into the mix slows down the transaction and jacks up the price. And this is also happening in brick-and-mortar commence. Amazon is slowly rolling out it’s Amazon Go supermarkets where there are no human staff to interact with customers at all. You just go in and take what you need from the shelves. The items are then automatically charged to your account. It’s all managed on your cell phone. And that’s awesome. I mean, it’s mostly awesome. The thing is, we humans are deeply social creatures. It’s not that any one interaction with a clerk, or retail staff, or co-worker, or ticket agent really means anything to us, but collectively all those little human interactions mean a lot.

The Silicon Valley Solution The future envisioned by Silicon Valley VCs is one where most of us work gig-economy jobs, conduct most of our social life online, and where we make our purchases friction-free at the tap of a button. It’s a future where inefficient human interaction is kept to an absolute minimum, and we can all get on with the task at hand. But you know what? That’s not going to happen. That would break us as human beings. There is a hopelessly misguided Western notion that what we really want is to be the center of the universe. That what we really want is for our needs catered to more quickly and more completely. We just need to keep running on our hedonic treadmills, and of course, we’ll be happy eventually. And if we are not happy yet, well that just means we have to run harder and faster and get more. But it’s nonsense. After our basic needs are met. Even the most obsequious, fawning robot servants who can read our emotions are not going to make us happy. We won’t survive the psychological strain of knowing that we are the bottleneck in every interaction. Understanding that whatever transaction we are trying to complete right now has been fully optimized and that we are the only thing slowing it down. Always being the weakest link. Always aware that we are the ones holding things up, that we are the source of friction, and that the rest of the world is standing behind us waiting for us to just finish our damn business and move the hell on. We are just not built for that kind of social stress. It would break us as a society. In fact, there are a lot of psychologists and social scientists who say it is already breaking us.

The Luddite Solution So what’s the answer? The Luddite solution of moving backward and undoing automation or even slowing it down won’t work. Not in the long run. Humans are expensive, and economic progress demands that we increase efficiency by using fewer and fewer people in any given transaction, and this pushes us relentlessly towards automation. And that’s a good thing. Automation improves the overall economic well-being of society. Trying to fight automation today is just a futile as when the original Luddites went around smashing looms in the 1800s. The logical benefits from automation are overwhelming, but what we need is something to soften the emotional blow.

The Evocative Solution The solution is evocative machines. The solution is machines that can make us care about them. That enable us to interact with them not int the way we interact with people, but perhaps in the way we interact with pets. We fully understand that our pets arre not human and that they do not have human emotions, but we largely treat them as if they do. The future is machines that allow, an even encourage us to form these kinds an emotional bonds with them. Think about it, many people, when they feel lonely, they buy a pet, and it works! However, when we buy a pet, when we get a dog or a cat, we don’t do it because wet want to have something love and care about us. No, we buys pets so that we have something to care for. To have something to love. More than almost anything else, we all need something to love. I’m not just talking about cute robots like GrooveX’s Lovot, or Softbank’s Pepper, or Yukai’s Bocco or even Gatebox’s Hikari. It’s not really about making robots look or act human or pet-like. It’s about giving us a new way to interact with all machines. Making a microwave or an ATM more efficient and user-friendly is fine, but imagine how much more enjoyable life would be if we looked forward to using the ATM not because it quickly got the job done, but simply because we liked that ATM. And I don’t mean we like that model of ATM or the UI/UX design, but because we like that particular ATM - the one on the first floor of the Park Street branch, the second one from the left. That one! What if we just liked that machine for what it was, and we enjoyed spending a bit of time with it. Sure, each transaction would be a bit less efficient, but so what? We don’t really need more efficiencies in our lives. Think about anything you choose to do for its own sake, something you do simply because you enjoy it, travel, writing, fishing, watching movies, eating out,