International Education:

Politics and Policies.

Third Activity.

Student: Arturo Fontangordo Rodríguez.

ID: 71.769.247-R.
e-mail: afontango1@alumno.uned.es.
February 2021.
Index.

1. Summarize the contemporary digital war between USA and China. ....................... 3
2. Analyze the importance of robotics in Japan compared to the Western fear to the
robotics. ................................................................................................................... 7
3. Explain the main robotic achievements in Japan................................................... 10
4. Bibliography........................................................................................................... 12

International Education – Activity 1 2

1. Summarize the contemporary digital war between USA and
China.

The fight for world supremacy in the new global scenario requires what Nye
(2009) has defined as “smart power”, a wise, exact combination of hard and soft power.
One key aspect of this smart power is technology control: if 19 th and 20th centuries
were the era of geopolitics, 21st century will be the era of geotechnology (Fundación
Telefónica, 2019).
We’ve recently lived a very illustrative incident related to this kind of new fight,
with the open war between China and USA around 5G. One of the biggest companies
in the world, Google, was forced to cut operating system supply and support to Huawei,
suspicious of espionage, according to US government. We can find another example
when analyzing the prohibition of selling high-tech semiconductors to China. New low
intensity conflicts show up in this way, rather than in black ops or agitprop activities.
This ‘digital war’ has also exposed the dramatic change in the weight of some
nations and blocs in the current world, compared to 20 or 30 years ago. In the transit
of 1G to 5G, Europe has lost its way (Piqué, 2019), from hosting some of the most
powerful tech companies (like Nokia or Ericsson), to be completely irrelevant, and
dangerously dependent on foreign technology to provide European citizens with the
most advanced capabilities. Technology requires technicians, and it’s calculated that
EU lacks around half a million of them (Fundación Telefónica, 2019).
Used to feeling the protective umbrella of USA (even if apparently looking down
on it), EU is experiencing a certain confused orphanhood, motivated by Brexit and US
retraction. Whilst EU would need more and more coordination to become really
effective, national politics prevents an authentic integration. For instance, the
European armies taken as a whole are clearly weaker than Russia forces; however, if
we summed up the military budgets of all EU countries, the total investment would be
much higher.
Russia, on the other hand, has drastically got reduced its smart power,
remaining a combination of classic hard power (armed forces, control of energetic raw
materials) and technology exclusively for military use. From an economic standpoint,
Russia is just a second order country, with a GNP similar to Italy’s. However, under

International Education – Activity 1 3

Putin’s administration, this country has managed to overcome some of these
limitations, through a deep understanding of hybrid war possibilities (Ballesteros in
Fundación Telefónica, 2019), achieving, for instance, a leading role in Middle East.
Putting himself stated in 2017: “whoever dominates artificial intelligence, will dominate
the world”.
Globalization is supposed to come from capitalism success, but present world
is far more complex (García Garrido et al., 2012). The multipolarity also expresses
itself into the digital world, as smaller actors can challenge powerful countries. Just
talking of Spain, in 2018 around 140,000 cyberattacks were addressed to both private
companies and public administrations, 750 of them against critical infrastructures
(those ones which are indispensable for country’s normal running and cannot be
substituted). Even non-state agents can participate in a very effective way using limited
resources: states still matter, but they’re not alone yet (Nye, 2010). ISIS, for instance,
has been able to spread over forty thousand documents in social networks; intelligence
services calculate that they own over seventy thousand accounts, ready to be activated
whenever it’s needed each time any of them is closed by administrators. This is the
dark side of cost reduction in computers and communications (one thousandth of
1970’s, according to Nye, 2010).
If misused, digital power (mainly through social media) is a source of social
polarization, capable of severely weakening democratic systems. The fake news and
misinformation campaigns are a real threat for most developed countries (Ballesteros,
in Fundación Telefónica, 2019). New wars not only consist in which army wins the
battles; it’s even more important which story prevails (Nye, 2010). EU last elections
were very conditioned, because of this, in a context where populisms were growing;
governments mainly worried about three aspects: electoral results data integrity,
personal data protection (in Spain, for example, politic parties can only access to
census data), and transparency in the process, avoiding any kind of interference.
In this sense, there are three sociological characteristics in the digital world
which change the rules of the game when we compare to Western societies in 19th and
20th centuries (Fundación Telefónica, 2019):
a) People is no more a “black box”. In the analogic world, you had to ask when you
wanted to know about personal preferences or tendencies. Now, big data allow

International Education – Activity 1 4

 to track the digital footprint to know almost everything of everybody, sometimes
even better than themselves. Social manipulation is easier than ever.
b) Social balkanization. There aren’t any shared perspectives. Each individual only
looks for associating just to other people with similar interests and opinions. The
perception of external reality is filtered by group’s hermeneutics.
c) Loss of experts’ authority. Today, any professional (a doctor after a medical
consultation, a teacher during his lessons, etc.) risks being ‘corrected’ by a
simple search in Google. This is just a symptom of the deep erosion of authority
sense, impacting to the highest extent politic institutions and mass media.
Democratic system is based on mutual control among different powers. The
great question mark today emerges from big data potential and tech companies’
management: ‘who controls whom watch us from the cyberspace?’ Available
information multiplies every day, so the influence lies on who can gain and keep
attention. The final conclusion about this is that world is less and less similar to
European historic set of values, as giant companies appear more and more as the new
feudal lords of the planet. Just to establish an order of dimension, total R&D budgets
in Europe account for twenty thousand million euro… approximately the same amount
that Google dedicates to R&D year on year.
In any case, it’s true that the globalization we live today is a consequence of the
end of the Cold War with the apparent ‘definitive’ triumph of liberal democracy (Piqué,
2019). But if the bipolar world had continued, we’d probably have lived two
‘globalizations’, as technology progress had been moving forward: one of them,
depending on USA and NATO; another one, depending on Soviet Union and Warsaw
Pact.
In fact, this is not an impossible scenario in the future. Unique IP identifiers all
over the world enable Internet working as a global network. Breaking Internet is as
easy as breaking this international consensus. If each country starts to decide what it
can be done and what it can’t; if we fragment the contents and the structure on Internet,
it’s just a question of time that the whole network splits. In a certain way, this is what’s
already going on in China, where usual services are restricted, and people usually run
local applications for instant messaging or e-commerce (Fundación Telefónica, 2019).

International Education – Activity 1 5

Desirable or not, we can imagine a future where two global networks will operate,
leaded by China and USA, in a new bipolar world.
In this context, we can interpret the declaration promoted by Antonio Guterres
and Emmanuel Macron during Paris Forum (November 2018) for a ‘safe cyberspace’
as a first high-level try to keep the globality of Internet out of any risk. Many states and
private companies signed the declaration, but protectionist politics prevented USA,
China and Russia to do so. In front of this uncertain future, a new optimistic vision of
technology is required, conceived as the key tool to solve inequalities and economic
breaches among regions and generations (Fundación Telefónica, 2019). This is far
away from current imaginary, where every possible future is envisioned in a dystopic
way, as it’s recurrently found in movies and TV series.
In the digital world, the tectonic movements in power balance point in the same
direction along last decades: from West to East. In fact, the Chinese (or Asian) rise
should be better named the Chinese return, after the ‘humiliation century’ (Nye, 2010).
USA, the old leader of unipolar world after Communism fall, has got exhausted while
pacificating the whole world. Although changes can happen in the near future with
Biden as new president, USA has been withdrawing for the last years, giving increased
chances to China to expand beyond its traditional influence sphere (Piqué, 2019). In
spite of its incoherencies and inconsistencies (Rodríguez, in Gavari & Rodríguez,
2013), Chinese soft power is rising and improving the international image of the
country. China has a very important advantage versus its Western rivals: whilst these
ones are subjected to electoral cycles, Chinese government can elaborate and
accomplish a careful long-term planning (30 years or more), worrying only about
efficacity and national interests, not about elections or public opinion. We talk of the
only Communist regime, obtaining is legitimacy from prosperity, building an impressive
national pride among its youth for the achievements in the last 30 years. Tiananmen is
really far, far away.
China has managed to juggle an iron Communist politic system with a state
capitalism able to encourage an amazing economic growth. The new China entered
the World Trade Organization as soon as 2001, while Russia, for example, do it in
2012. But its alleged “open” economy still presents important barriers to any foreign
company trying to operate there (Fundación Telefónica, 2019). China has diversified

International Education – Activity 1 6

its geostrategic bets: Brasil, Africa, and lately the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative, also
known as New Silk Road), a gigantic project launched in 2013, including the longest
railway in the world: 13,000 km. from Yiwu to Madrid. The ‘silent invasion’, according
to Western criticists, who insist in Europe’s and USA’s common culture, so different
from oriental cosmovision.
For 2049, in the symbolic centenary of Mao’s revolution triumph, Chinese
authorities expect to have transformed the country into the first world power, in terms
of economy, military, technology and politic influence. In just twenty years, they have
recovered a 10-year delay versus USA (Fundación Telefónica, 2019). But differently
to USA (or even Soviet Union), they don’t aspire to export Communism abroad, just
ensure its influence is hegemonic over the rest of the world. If Cold War can be
conceived as a match between two clearly distinguishable blocs to demonstrate the
highest efficacy to reach economic and technological development, today the link
between liberal democracy and efficacy has been broken. China, rather than Western
World, has become the role model for developing countries, in a context where
digitalization widens, rather than closes the breach among regions and countries: in
developed nations, over 80% of population access Internet, versus less of 40% in
developing countries (Fundación Telefónica, 2019).
Whilst we tend to approximate to this new framework with fear, Nye (2010)
suggests a change in mindset to take the emerging opportunities for humankind. There
are huge challenges ahead of all, beyond borders and national governments control:
drug commerce, pandemics, illegal financial flows… Power is chaotically distributed:
the only way to tackle this global issues is by cooperation and a smart use of soft power
to work together for the global public wellbeing.

2. Analyze the importance of robotics in Japan compared to the

Western fear to the robotics.

Japanese vision on robotics is very far away from the Western mindset, which
we’re used to in Europe or America. The deep roots of this difference can be found in
religion: Japanese tradition is shintoistic, generating a cosmovision radically different

International Education – Activity 1 7

to the one shaped by monotheism, particularly Christianism, which forged Western
world along two millennia. Shinto is the traditional religion in Japan; although it’s only
formally practiced by around three million people, 80% (108 million) of Japanese admit
its influence on their systems of values and beliefs. It’s based on the cult to the
ancestors (Kitasawa, 1915), and played an essential role in the construction of modern
Japan after 1868 revolution and the constitution of the Imperial family as the binding
agent of the new national pride.
But Shinto is also an animistic religion (Kobayashi, 2001), that is, it confers a
specific force or energy to both animate and inanimate beings: rivers, trees, animals…
This made Japanese think of ‘life’ in a very different way to western people:
Inochi, the Japanese word for “life,” encompasses three basic, seemingly
contradictory but inter-articulated meanings: a power that infuses sentient beings from
generation to generation; a period between birth and death; and, most relevant to
robots, the most essential quality of something, whether organic (natural) or
manufactured. (Robertson, 2014).
So, for Japanese scientists and common people, there’s no meaningful debate
about the possibility of consciousness or independent existence of a robot: it’s
something they take for granted. Furthermore, they conceive robots as benevolent
beings, just willing to become humans; as any other human creation they can be as
good or as bad as their creators, but there’s no fear about losing control of them
(Robertson, 2010).
On the other hand, the popular imaginary about increasingly powerful robots,
more and more like human beings in terms of appearance and behavior, also awakes
very diverse feelings according to Western and Japanese cultures. For the former, it
generates a kind of atavistic unease, linked to a multiple set of dystopias showed by
movies and literature. Perhaps we could interpret this as the moral of the
Frankenstein’s myth, as a consequence of Christian tradition: if you play to be God,
you’ll be harmed by your creation. However, for the latter, future robots are connected
to familiar, nice popular symbols like Astro Boy or Doraemon, present in daily life of
several generations.
But for Japanese, robots are friendly for deeper reasons. Let’s consider three
key aspects of society in Japan (Robertson, 2014):

International Education – Activity 1 8

 1) Demographic crisis: 21% of Japanese are over 65; in 30 years this proportion
will double. Maternity is delayed, for women looking for a longer, more
successful professional career.
2) Minimum immigration: Japanese are in general very jealous of their cultural
and ethnic particularities; they feel ‘safer’ with robots rather than immigrants.
It’s extremely difficult for a foreigner to get the Japanese citizenship, even after
several generations living in the country or being married with a Japanese
spouse. Generally speaking, Japanese feel stressed in front of linguistic and
cultural diversity.
3) Social life constituted around ie, instead of individuals. In spite of postwar
constitution, Japan still organizes unofficially the social life around this
minimum cell, assimilable to a modern household, but much more similar to
older institutions, like the Roman domus.
With this in mind, we can better understand apparently strange situations. For
example, elderly people prefer to be cared by robots rather than by immigrants; the
same applies for parents regarding their children. Or robots receiving koseki (the
official document registering a new household) or juminhyo (special residence permit),
something extremely difficult for a non-Japanese person (Robertson, 2014). For
Japanese, it’s not a matter of distinguishing people and robots; it’s a matter of
distinguishing Japanese (humans and robots) and foreigners.
When the Shinzo Abe’s government launched in 2007 its Innovation 25 program
to foster robotization in Japanese ordinary life, it was simply continuing the historical
trend of promoting automation over immigration. Japanese count on robotics to recover
the economic growth and to preserve the ethnic homogeneity. Therefore, especially
from a conservative standpoint, admitting robots within the framework of the ie is the
best way to readapt and provide stability to the traditional system, in a context where
modern habits and demographic challenges are a remarkable threat (Robertson,
2014).
This ‘extended family’ proposal got a clear example when the engineer Junji
Suzuki and his wife ‘adopted’ in 2005 “Wakamaru”, a wheeled robot developed by the
company where Mr. Suzuki worked (Mitsubishi Co.). For more than a year, Wakamaru
took part of the natural family life, treated by Suzuki’s children as a new brother in the

International Education – Activity 1 9

family, and used by the parents as house-sitter, through an integrated camera
connected to their mobile phones. Suzuki notes that Wakamaru developed its own
‘personality’, like a human, through interpersonal encounters or even watching TV.
We’ll conclude with a very interesting reflection proposed by Robertson (2010).
As ‘Cool Japan’ spreads Japanese pop culture all over the world, Western younger
generations are more and more influenced by Japanese lifestyles and ways of doing.
So maybe they’ll embrace relationships with robots in a more similar way to their
contemporaries Japanese; our Western current reluctances could be got past.

3. Explain the main robotic achievements in Japan.

Robotics is probably more important in Japan industry and daily life than
anywhere else in the world. According to Robertson (2014), Japan was at that time
employing more than 250,000 industrial robot workers, and by 2025 the total number
could reach around 750,000. It’s quite usual finding robots not only in factories, but in
hospitals, offices and, as previously said, at homes. For example, in 2018, Japan
became the first country to have robotic cardiac surgery in the national health system
(Taroi et al., 2019).
In a study published in 2008, Bekey and Yuh compared Japan with the other
three more advanced countries/regions in robotics: USA, Southern Korea and
European Union. Japan was leading 6 out of 11 technological areas, including applied
research, personal robotics, industrial robotics and humanoids. Regarding this last
topic, Japan is leading by far the development of this kind of robots. As we commented
in the previous section, the fact of neither needing any kind of ethical debate about
“life” or “conscience” in robots, nor fearing to create “too human” robots has probably
fueled the extremely quick progress in this area.
We can define a robot as an aggregation of software and hardware (sensors,
telecommunication systems, motors, batteries, etc.), capable of an active interaction
with the environment, either with human supervision (direct or teleoperated), or in a
completely autonomous way. A key unique element in Japanese robotics is the
“embodied intelligence” (Robertson, 2014), a concept that makes extremely blurry the

International Education – Activity 1 10

differences between life and cognition, and between intelligence and consciousness;
Japanese scientists don’t care about this, indeed; this sort of philosophical debate is
not present in Japan academy.
To be considered “humanoid”, a robot must meet two criteria (Robertson, 2014):
“it has to have a body that resembles a human (head, arms, torso, legs) and it has to
perform in a human-like manner”. This is the point where embodied intelligence
emerges as the characteristic allowing this kind of complex, dynamic interaction, up to
a level which enables (or even constitutes, according to some researchers) sociality
and proofs of affectivity. Takeno (2011), for example, describes his Module of Nerves
for Advanced Dynamics (MoNAD) as the core of a conscious robot. This development
would use two recursive neural networks to get connections to the real world (sensors)
and to accomplish operations in the abstract (represented) world. The intersectional
neurons would synchronize both networks, so building a sophisticated system with
multiple MoNADs would give rise to an artificial conscious system. In fact, Kushiro,
Harada and Takeno (2013) demonstrated that a robot with this MoNAD architecture
“develops the ability to learn previously unknown categories and concepts as new
MoNAD”, in a way that can be considered equivalent to the subliminal response of a
human brain to an unknown situation.
One of the most stunning examples of humanoid robots in Japan is Geminoid
HI-1, developed by Hiroshi Ishiguro in the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication
Laboratories (Nishio, Ishiguro and Hagita, 2007), with the intention of “blurring the
boundaries between robots and humans” (Ishiguro, 2013). Last researches discover
the human brain got activated in a different way when interacting with other humans or
with robots. Geminoid HI-1 is designed not only to behave, but also to have the exact
appearance of a human being. The prototype is partially teleoperated, to avoid current
limitations related to AI intelligence, and interacts only in a seating position (it lacks the
capability of walking around). The robot succeeded in interacting in a real human
context during ARS Electronica in Linz in 2009 (Becker-Asano et al., 2010). Ishiguro
suggests possible applications of the “geminoid” series: acting as clerks. controlled by
humans only when a non-typical response is not required; or substituting the real
person in another location (for example, a simultaneous conference in different
countries).

International Education – Activity 1 11

 Finally, although Japanese research on robotics is mainly focused on
technology progress, some voices are appearing to claim for an ethics debate that
correctly frame a future ‘mixed’ society, shared by humans and robots. As Yuko et al.
state, “our everyday lifestyles are under co-evolution with technology. Our mindset,
however, may change more slowly.” According to these researchers, we need
guidelines of education, in a two-folded direction, which should include both humans
and machines. Although the latter may accelerate the computing process of a local
value system, the fully integration of it in daily common life will require much more
computation as that of any system integrations.

4. Bibliography.
Becker-Asano, C., Ogawa, K., Nishio, S., & Ishiguro, H. (2010). Exploring the uncanny
valley with Geminoid HI-1 in a real-world application. In Proceedings of IADIS
International conference interfaces and human computer interaction, 121-128).
Recovered from: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christian_Becker-Asano/
publication/229059888_Exploring_the_uncanny_valley_with_Geminoid_HI-
1_in_a_real-world_application/links/0912f50b5da8f939c9000000.pdf.
Bekey, G., & Yuh, J. (2008). The status of robotics. IEEE Robotics & Automation
Magazine, 15(1), 80-86. DOI: 10.1109/M-RA.2007.907356.
Fundación Telefónica (2019, May 23). Geotecnología: Internet define las reglas de
juego del nuevo orden mundial [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=NkJZnHLR0gI.
García Garrido, J.L., García Ruiz, M.J. y Gavari Starkie, E. (2012). La Educación
Comparada en tiempos de globalización. Madrid: Ediasa
Gavari Starkie, E., Rodríguez Jiménez F.J. (2015). Estrategias de diplomacia cultural
en un mundo interpolar. Madrid: Editorial Universitaria Ramón Areces.
Hirotaka, W. (2018). The new Japonisme: From international cultural exchange to
cultural diplomacy. Discuss Japan—Japan Foreign Policy Forum, 50. Recovered
from: https://www.japanpolicyforum.jp/diplomacy/pt20181030130003. html.
Ishiguro, H. (2013). Humanoid Robot - Gemonoid HI-1 Android Prototype [Video].
Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD1CdjlrTBM.

International Education – Activity 1 12

Kitasawa, S. (1915). Shintoism and the Japanese Nation. The Sewanee Review, 23(4),
479-483. Recovered from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27532848.pdf.
Kobayashi, A. (2001). Shintoism. Journal of Dharma, 26(1), 87-95. Recovered from:
http://www.dvkjournals.in/index.php/jd/article/view/641/532.
Kushiro, K., Harada, Y., & Takeno, J. (2013). Robot uses emotions to detect and learn
the unknown. Biologically inspired cognitive architectures, 4, 69-78. DOI:
10.1016/j.bica.2013.01.002.
Nishio, S., Ishiguro, H., & Hagita, N. (2007). Geminoid: Teleoperated android of an
existing person. In De Pina Filho, J. (ed.) Humanoid robots: New developments,
343-352. Rijeka (Croatia): InTech.
Nye, J. (2009). Get Smart: Combining Hard and Soft Power. Foreign Affairs, 88(4),
160-163. Recovered from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20699631.
Nye, J. (2010). Global Power shifts [Video]. TEDGlobal. https://www.ted.com/talks/
joseph_nye_global_power_shifts/.
Piqué, J. Universidad Camilo José Cela. (2019, February 28). El mundo que nos viene
[Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMMAGcsG1pc
Robertson, J. The Agenda with Steve Paikin (2010). Japan’s Robot Nation [Video].
Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9HgYHSJUP0.
Robertson, J. (2014). Human rights vs. robot rights. Critical Asian Studies, 46(4), 571-
598. DOI:10.1080/14672715.2014.960707.
Takeno, J. (2011). MoNAD structure and the self-awareness. In Biologically Inspired
Cognitive Architectures 2011 Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the
BICA Society, 377-382. DOI: 10.3233/978-1-60750-959-2-377.
Tarui, T., Ishikawa, N., Horikawa, T., Seguchi, R., Shigematsu, S., Kiuchi, R., Miyata,
K., Tomita, S., Ohtake, H, and Watanabe, G. (2019). First Major Clinical
Outcomes of Totally Endoscopic Robotic Mitral Valve Repair in Japan. A Single-
Center Experience. Circulation journal, 83(8), 1668-1673. DOI: 10.1253/circj.CJ-
19-0284.
Yuko, M., Takeo, T., Takushi, O., & Yasunari, H. (2017). Ethics of Information
Education for Living with Robots: Current Situations in Japan and the future. The
ORBIT Journal, 1(1), 1-13. DOI: 10.29297/orbit.v1i1.21.

International Education – Activity 1 13