Replaying Japan 2026

Last week I was at Replaying Japan 2026 in Osaka at the Ibaraki campus of Ritsumeikan University. The campus is brand new modern high-tech campus with some amazing lab rooms.

The conference was one of the best Replaying Japan conferences. The quality of the papers was high and there was a breadth of topics. I would have to liked to see more Japanese graduate students.

I was part of a panel on “Hollywood Kyoto: Documenting the Historic Toei Kyoto Studio Park.” I presented with Nakamura, Yamaguchi, Amano, Fujiwara, and Kaltman. We discussed a project that is creating a web site documenting the Toei Kyoto Studio Park where a lot of Jidaigeki were filmed. Toei had a permanent Edo era set for filming period dramas (often with Samurai plots) at their Uzumasa theme park/studios. When Toei decided to tear down the set our colleagues at Ritsumeikan took thousands of pictures to document the historic film set. In our project we used the photos and photogrammetry to build a 3D model of the set which users can walk through on the web site we are building. The web site then adds interviews with people who worked on the set and introductory material.

As soon as the project is finished we will make it accessible.

We Must Act Now

From an NPR article on whether new graduates are losing jobs to AI, I learned about a short open letter signed by numerous economists, We Must Act Now
A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy. The text of the letter is just three short points to the effect of, 1) AI is getting better and better, 2) there may be significant economic disruption in a short period of time including job displacement, therefore, 3),

Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

Virtually Parkinson

Jeff Gomez gave a moving keynote at Replaying Japan 2026 about storyworlds. He mentioned Virtually Parkinson an AI driving interview show. They created an AI version of Michael Parkinson who interviews people, even though the original died in 2023.

Virtually Parkinson is a groundbreaking talk show where the legendary Sir Michael Parkinson is brought back to life—virtually. Using advanced AI technology, an authentic digital replica of Sir Michael engages in insightful, unscripted conversations with some of today’s most compelling personalities. Blending innovation with classic interview charm, the series delves deep into the personal journeys, creative philosophies, and life-changing moments of its guests. Each episode is crafted with cutting-edge AI-driven dialogue, providing a unique fusion of past and present.

Autonomous mobile security robot

Autonomous mobile security robot introduced by Ritsumeikan University — Capable of monitoring via a 360‐degree camera and can be used to detect obstacles and people

I’m at Replaying Japan 2026, a conference. on Japanese game culture being held at the Ibaraki campus of Ritsumeikan University. They have these pickle shaped “security” robots rolling slowly down the halls. I searched for something about these devices and found this: Autonomous mobile security robot introduced by Ritsumeikan University — Capable of monitoring via a 360‐degree camera and can be used to detect obstacles and people.

Just what will they do with the data? What could they do? How would lidar and video lead to security improvements or is this security theatre?

Archive-IT Vault

Store, manage, and preserve digital collections with Vault, a flexible and customizable digital repository and preservation solution designed for libraries, heritage and arts organizations, publishers, researchers, and individuals.

Just heard about the Archive-IT Vault. For a one-time fee you can deposit materials to archive. The key is that you pay a “one-time price per gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress costs.” This way you don’t have to continue paying or lose your archive.

One wonders how long the Vault will last. Given that it builds on the Internet Archive‘s experience and infrastructure, it is probably a good bet that it will last some time.

I’m reminded of Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know which is partly about what we might be able to know about the present in a post-ecological disaster future. All sorts of digital records have been preserved and can be searched by AI, but historians still don’t know what happened to a key document.

Fiume o morte!

I was pointed to a great documentary Fiume o morte! (Fiume or death) which is free to watch on Vimeo. The documentary tells the story of the occupation of Rijeka, known in Italian as Fiume, by the fascist Italian poet D’Annunzio and a small army of Italian soldiers in 1919. Despite opposition from the Italian government, the occupation of the city on the Adriatic coast of Croatia attracted thousands of Italian youth. The documentary tells the story though a creative mix of recreation, historical evidence, humour and reflection. Multiple amateur locals play D’Annunzio and much of the narration is in Fiumano, the dialect of Italian still spoken by some in Rijeka.

Watch it!

Situational Awareness … or Blindness

You can see the future first in San Francisco.

The New York Times has a story about the company Situational Awareness, Floundering A.I. ‘Nostradamus’ Hedge Fund Is Rescued by Rival. The company was founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner who wrote an essay on Situational Awareness arguing that,

The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.

The company basically was set up to bet on the predictions from the 2024 essay. Alas, they bet too much and there has recently been a drop in the value of some of the AI-related companies they bet on so they had to be rescued.

The phrase, “situational awareness”, however comes from the belief that those in and around San Francisco, working in AI labs, have a privileged awareness of what is happening or going to happen. The essay begins with the phrase,

Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness.

The subtext is that the rest of us are ignorant and should believe the SF folk because of where they are and where they work. This runs in the face of research about the value of expert predictions. Philip E. Tetlock’s work on forecasting suggests that generalists outperform those with a narrow expert focus.

Our generation too easily takes for granted that we live in peace and freedom. And those who herald the age of AGI in SF too often ignore the elephant in the room: superintelligence is a matter of national security, and the United States must win.

There is a further issue with the essay, and that it is the compounded prediction that since superintelligence is going to happen, and it will be the most powerful weapon ever developed, it is important that WE (the Unites States) control it. It is all about the “win” and betting on that win.

How does one unpack the assumptions in this essay and situational ideology?

DHCC Project Self-Assessment Tool (v1.0)

This self-assessment tool is intended to support Digital Humanities practitioners, researchers, technicians, curators, software engineers, and related professionals seeking to embed environmental sustainability into their project design, delivery, and reporting. In line with the EPSRC AREA framework for responsible research and innovation, the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition recommends using the tool to reflect on how project design, delivery, and reporting might Anticipate, Reflect on, Engage with, and Act to mitigate the environmental impacts of Digital Humanities work.

At DH2026 I heard Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert present on DH and sustainability. The Digital Humanities Climate Coalition has produced a DHCC Project Self-Assessment Tool (v1.0). This tool is a series of questions to get people to think about the sustainability of their project. It was inspired by the Framework for responsible research and innovation.

She talked about different events she organized at the British Library, inviting people who had developed workshops to run them at the BL. Another project to look at is the The Carbon Literacy Project.

With Chelsea Miya I worked on a paper on “Platitudes: The Carbon Weight of the Post-Platform Scholarly Web.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing. Vol. 28, No. 2. 2025. https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7247 .

What I like about the Self-Assessment Tool is that it asks questions, though they are leading questions rather than questions that don’t have obvious answers. I think it could be used by students to assess DH projects.

Pacing the Frontier

We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

Over a 1000 employees of frontier AI companies, including Dario Amodei, have issued a statement, Pacing the Frontier, that calls for the AI governance. Some of the things to note:

  • It is similar to the 2023 Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter that was also signed by all sorts of important people (and some unimportant people like me. In both, the idea is that we need to go more slowly if we are to make sure that AI is safe and used for good.
  • This version doesn’t ask the AI labs to “immediately pause”, but asks for the U.S. government to “support an international effort” which is an interesting shift. That international effort already exists in the form of the network of AI Safety Institutes set up after the Bletchley Summit. (I am on the Research Council of the Canadian AISI.) I also note that the statement calls for “support” not leadership. This is realistic as few countries are likely to sign up to be led by the U.S. right now. This U.S. Administration has squandered any international good will they had, at least from Canada.
  • Another difference is the call for “governance tools.” This sounds a lot like the “regulation” word that normally isn’t welcome in innovation focused circles. To be fair there are other sorts of tools that can be used to govern companies and products. Many exist now, they just have to be used. The problem is that governing is something humans do. No amount of tools left on the shop floor of government are going to substitute for consistent, public, articulate governing. Who has a track record doing this? Who would trust the U.S. to support them?
  • I should add that “technical and governance tools” sounds again like a techno-solutionism where you solve problems that arise from the poor governance of technology with more technology. (See Morozov’s book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.)
  • Finally, I should mention that the opening to the Statement has a now tired hinge statement of the sort “AI will save us all, BUT ….” where after the hinge (the BUT) there is a little problem raised for which, of course, the authors have a solution.

AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

To realize AI’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight. But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress.

Sorry, Sam and Elon, we have not reached the Singularity

Gary Marcus has a nice substack gathering recent (and not so recent) inflated statements from the titans of the AI industry (Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis) to the effect that we are in the Singularity.

Is this more Singularity Theatre, a performance designed to keep us glued to our seats waiting for the next act (and paying as we sit)? Or is it the Rapture of Nerds to name a Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross novel. The Rapture would be the supposedly inevitable end when we are swept up from this corrupt meat world and immortalized in a virtual heaven.

Either way, a history of science-fiction works like Stross’s Accelerando deserve attention as imaginative ground in which such technological speculations grow.