Haven’t I Seen your Face Before? －あなたの顔を前に見たことがあるんじゃないか？－

I heard an interesting story on the radio this morning.  An elderly British man needed to buy some groceries.  So he went down to a local shop to pick up his bread, milk and so on. 

As he was walking through the aisles, selecting products, one of the shop staff came over to him. 

“I am sorry, but I am going to have to ask you to leave the shop, Sir.” 

The confused old man was led away towards the door.  At the door, he turned around and asked why he was being thrown out. 

“Our cameras have facial recognition software.  We have a contract with a company that registers the faces of suspected serial shoplifters.  The software has just set off an alarm, telling us that you are a serial shoplifter.” 

The old man had never stolen anything from a shop in his life.  He protested his innocence.  The shop staff gave the man the contact details of the company which had registered his face as that of a criminal. 

After some emails and discussion back and forth with this company, it was accepted that the man’s face had been added to the database in error.  He had visited a shop at around the same time that a shoplifter had.  The elderly man had to go through his banking details with the company to prove that he had paid for the items he had bought in the shop. 

So in the end the elderly man’s face was removed from the database of suspected shoplifters.  But he says he feels nervous when out shopping, and tries to avoid walking in front of surveillance cameras, in case the same thing happens again and he is shamed in public like a criminal. 

It seems like this is the future.  As more and more often we are being watched by technology, who is watching the technology?

Paperwork Problems －ペーパーワーク問題－

Governments love paperwork.  You need the correct visa, passport, form, permission slip, stamp or signature to get anything from the government.  And new governments love to change the paperwork.  The old stamp is no longer sufficient.  Now you need the new, and more expensive one. 

Now the stamps have been replaced with an online system.  But electronic permission is even worse than stamps, since there is never a real human being available for you to explain your problem to any more. 

“You will find all necessary information on our website.” 

Things get even worse when the government forgets to tell people that the process has changed. 

One such case of a sudden paperwork change has been making news this week in Britain.  The change affects people who hold dual nationality – that is, a British passport and also the passport of another country. 

Until this year, those dual nationals were able to enter the U.K. using either passport.  Now these people have to enter the U.K. only with their British passport. 

But the government did little to publicize the change.  Many dual nationals have let their British passport expire and made travel plans, not realizing that they would be unable to reenter Britain.  They are now scrambling to get their passports renewed, or are having to stay outside the U.K. longer than they had planned. 

The situation reminded me of the opening of Douglas Adams’ novel, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.  An alien fleet of ships suddenly appears above the Earth, ready to demolish the whole planet to make room for a kind of highway through space. 

The United Nations and the governments of Earth frantically complain that they hadn’t heard of these plans. 

The alien is entirely unsympathetic. 

“The plans have been available in the local planning office in Alpha Centauri for the last nine months.  Honestly, if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local government plans then that is your problem.”

 

Revenge of the Little People －小さい人たちの仕返し－

I recently listened to an audio version of an old book by a science fiction writer.  “The Cyberiad,” by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, was first published in 1965.  It is a kind of mixture of science fiction and fairy tales.  The idea is that robots in the far future tell their own series of fairy tales, partly explaining their morality and fears. 

The heroes of the stories are the constructor robots, Trurl and Klapaucius.  In one story, Trurl is travelling in deep space when he encounters another robot which is stuck on an asteroid.  Trurl lands on the asteroid and speaks to this other robot.  The robot explains that he was the king of one planet, but he was considered such a bad and cruel ruler that he was exiled to this asteroid and cannot now get off the lonely little world.  He begs Trurl to take him back to the planet which he once ruled. 

Trurl doesn’t want to upset the people of the planet by returning the exiled king.  But he feels sorry for the lonely robot.  So he promises to build a new world for the cruel king to rule over.  He builds a tiny little world full of microscopic creatures, who live and die on a world the size of a little box. 

The king is delighted with the gift and starts ruling over the world, threatening to shake the box and cause earthquakes if the inhabitants don’t follow his strict rules and build statues of him. 

Trurl flies away and meets his friend, Klapaucius.  When he tells Klapaucius what he has done, his friend is angry. 

“Why have you created this life and left it to be tortured by this awful king?  You have to go back to that asteroid and set the people of the box free.” 

Trurl realizes the cruelty he has inflicted on the microscopic creatures.  So he and Klapaucius return to the asteroid.  When they get there, there is initially no sign of the king, or the box.  The whole of the asteroid is covered in tiny cities.  Given their microscopic size, the created creatures live and develop much faster than fully sized creatures.  They have developed a high level of technology, and they have escaped their box and spread across the asteroid. 

Wondering what has happened to the bad king, Trurl eventually sees his frozen body, floating around the asteroid as a moon.  It seems that the creatures of the box rebelled against his rule and managed to expel him into space, where he will float above them forever, like a cold, dead god. 

All life that can think and feel pain is to be valued, no matter how small and insignificant it may seem, and no matter how humble or artificial its beginnings.