02-05-2025
Want to see the future at Expo Osaka? Get in line.
The car pulls into Yumeshima Station with a shhh, and the gleaming doors with a trim of neon green lights open onto a brand new train platform. I'm headed to the Osaka Expo 2025, a six-month world fair that wants to 'design future society for our lives,' and though I expect a whisper-quiet entrance to match the train ride, my first thought is that the future is very loud and full of rules.
As the doors open, I'm hit with a wall of sound. As if in anticipation of waves of lost people in uncontrollable crowds, the expo has stationed attendants every few meters, each armed with a megaphone, each shouting instructions at the same time, but out of sync. The blare reverberates in the metro tunnel, bouncing against the ceiling of an expansive hall and atrium, the layered intensity and crisscrossing directives ultimately making it impossible to decipher any message at all.
Welcome to the Osaka Expo.
Hiroshi Ishiguro's exhibit imagines a world in which androids have become fully integrated into human society. |
Thu-Huong Ha
The world expo is a strange event, in that it seeks to show the public a vision of the future, yet the way we primarily interact with it is by looking back. What's interesting about them is what has stuck: The Eiffel Tower, sewing machines, the telephone, steam locomotion — to the modern ear, world expos mainly seem old-timey and quaint. As I walk around the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka Bay, I can't help but think this imagined future looks like something cooked up by Hollywood in the 1990s.
I get in line — this is Japan's vision of the future, after all, where constant queueing is still de rigueur — for one of the buzzy marvels inside the pavilion hosted by Pasona. The HR company's exhibition, under the disproportionately humble theme 'Thank You, Life,' personified by Astro Boy, contains roomfuls of gadgets and predictions.
On a hypothetical timeline of Earth's history, 'Birth of the internet' and 'Rise of social networks' are somehow each just as important as 'Cambrian explosion' and 'Humans appear,' and from there it escalates quickly: Bees go extinct, then in the next phase, so does all life on Earth. I'm more intrigued by the exhibit's 'future sleep' bed prototypes, which adjust to your weight, movements, breath and heart rate to create optimal sleep conditions. I am desperate to crawl into one of the pods, but, ah, of course, the future is by reservation only.
What I've come to see, though, is an 'iPS heart,' a little flash of something in a clear vessel filled with blood-red liquid in the middle of one of the exhibition rooms. This is not really a heart, but a cluster of heart cells created from human-induced pluripotent stem cells in the shape of a heart. And just like a heart, these cells can beat.
A presentation showing the likes of Thomas Edison and Hippocrates flash in the background, with quotes by these great men meant to make us feel that we're witnessing the future of medicine.
In 2012, Shinya Yamanaka won a Nobel Prize in medicine for his development of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. His lab reprogrammed mature, specialized mouse skin cells to make immature, pluripotent ones, meaning they could grow into different types of cells in the body; later, his team was able to do the same thing with human cells. This was a breakthrough in understanding cells themselves, and could have wide-ranging significance, including the potential for tissue replacement using a patient's own cells, which reduces reliance on embryos and lowers the risk of the body rejecting someone else's cells.
Here in this room in Osaka, the implications of a beating iPS heart developed by Yoshiki Sawa of medical start-up Cuorips are not clear, a fact that is clearly irrelevant. The spectacle is more Mona Lisa than flying car: Not only is this a mysterious celebrity of murky provenance and meaning, but no one seems to care. The backs of people's heads block the 3.5-centimeter object, their hands pressing phones and long telephoto lenses to the case, intent on capturing what they've waited in line to see. In the future, just like in the present, proof of witnessing trumps understanding. Pics of the future, or it won't happen.
An 'iPS heart' at HR company Pasona's pavilion represents the promise of lab-grown human heart cells. |
Reuters
That night, standing in a queue under a blast of cold rain, I'm told that all the slots for the exhibition I want to see are full for the day, but I can join the wait list. (The future, by the way, is also full of QR codes.) I check my phone. It's 7 p.m., and ''Future of life,' by Ishiguro,' has 829 people in its virtual line.
I am very keen to see a me-sized avatar, but I'm running out of time to catch my train back to Tokyo, at which point I wonder if press credentials still work in the future. They do, and soon I'm being adorned with a heavy headset and pushed in with a group through an hour-long guided show.
The exhibition by renowned roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University is an impressively produced multistage, multifloor robot extravaganza. Three android tarento (TV personalities), including a likeness of Matsuko Deluxe, chat like they're on a variety show. Across the way, android Natsume Soseki sits at a desk with some books splayed open; the author of 'I Am a Cat' puts his hand to his brow and looks unconsolable, in a pretty convincing imitation of what it looks like to be a writer. In the final stage, three androids from 1,000 years in the future give a musical performance that's a Bjork-'Minority Report' mash-up fever dream.
The exhibit's main story centers on a narrative just 50 years in the future, by which time androids have been fully integrated into human society. We enter a room and ride a train to a futuristic city called Yumeshima, which means Dream Island, accompanied by a robot boy who spends the whole ride twitching in response to no apparent stimuli. A projection shows a little girl and her grandmother discussing the girl's android classmate, who's rumored to have the memories of his grandfather.
After a bad diagnosis, the elder woman is given a choice: She can pass naturally or upload her memories to an android. 'In that body, will I still be able to think about the people I love?' she asks. 'It's as close as you can get,' the doctor replies with the chilling compassion of a disc jockey.
One of the arguments for making lifelike androids is that the more they look and move like us, the more we'll trust and relate to them. Human-like smiles and eye contact can create the feeling that the robots have empathy, which has applications for caregiving and education. It's an urgent issue in Japan, where researchers are focused on robot solutions to address their aging population and labor crisis.
But as I envision a future with a robot sitting at my kitchen table with all my mother's memories, I struggle to grasp what I, or my mother, would gain. My real (very alive) mother does like to talk about the past, but the way we spend time is beyond conversation, lying instead in service, in warmth, the feel of her rounded shoulder, just below mine, as she shrugs my hand off because she's trying to flip a deep-fried spring roll and I'm in the way.
Latest advancements in robotics show androids doing human things and how human they look while doing them — taking selfies, playing air guitar, tossing popcorn into their mouths. Behold, how they look like us. And in AI, what gets the most attention is how closely generated art can mimic human art — it looks just like a Studio Ghibli movie, or sounds just like metafiction. But it's worth at least a few seconds of contemplation: Why exactly are we so intent on making our technology in our own likeness? Because, really, are humans so great?
The final beat of the exhibit is a quote from Ishiguro: 'We can design the future and live the life we want.' Technologists believe they push humanity forward by seeking solutions to alleviate physical pain and cure disease. But I confess I'm not as skilled at looking to the future — maybe because the present is so distracting: how intractable it seems, how we seem to be sliding backward, how we've destroyed our home, how corruption, greed, subjugation and power lock the world into conflicts that look unsettlingly similar to ones from a century ago.
At the expo, where Israel's booth is placed under the umbrella group theme 'Saving lives,' where the U.S. pavilion is designed as a 'gateway for all visitors' with the ridiculous exhortation to 'Imagine what we can create together' scrawled in neon, where Russia didn't even bother to show up, where China and the U.S. passive-aggressively battle it out for who has the better moon rock, the entire endeavor to present a utopian vision of global peace and cooperation starts to look like nationalist vaudeville. Modern developed societies have a tendency to look forward, thinking we are barreling toward progress and a better future, when these past few years have shown what is really broken, and where the real disease lies.
