Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not

Sometime in the late 1980s, I participated in a meeting organized by the Honda Foundation in which a Japanese professor--I can't remember his name--made the case that the Japanese had more success integrating robots into society because of their country's indigenous Shinto religion, which remains the official national religion of Japan. Followers of Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and the Greeks before them, do not believe that humans are particularly "special." Instead, there are spirits in everything, rather like the Force in Star Wars. Nature doesn't belong to us, we belong to Nature, and spirits live in everything, including rocks, tools, homes, and even empty spaces. The West, the professor contended, has a problem with the idea of things having spirits and feels that anthropomorphism, the attribution of human-like attributes to things or animals, is childish, primitive, or even bad.