WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 35

Leaving the job/homelessness in Japan/some rambling thoughts about AI

I have decided to quit as a train station cleaner, at least for the summer. The bosses and my coworkers are wonderful people, absolutely lovely, but it’s getting hot in Japan and I probably need a couple of hundred yen more per hour. The train station job pays around 1,200, but 1,400 would make life easier.

This week I talked to Skeletor, head of the dispatch office. He was very understanding, and told me that all I need to do, to leave, is not sign another contract. Contracts are issued on a monthly basis to some people, presumably the newbies, and every three months to people who have settled into the job. A few people are ‘seishain’, or ‘full company employees’, and these, I believe, re-sign once a year.

Given that I have enjoyed these past couple of months, I would definitely be open to going back in the autumn if they’ll have me. But, for now, supermarket or hotel room cleaning for a touch more pay would be great. As mentioned in previous installments of this blog, such vacancies abound in Japan, a nation increasingly understaffed.

For now, I have a trickle of income from other sources: evening English lessons and proofreading for a publisher. I day trade with varying degrees of success, which also brings in small amounts. This week, having been paid by the cleaning company, and having made a few yen on a couple of good trades last week, I went to Shinjuku to see what I could do for some of the homeless people there.

Now, homelessness in Japan is an interesting topic. I do believe there are fewer people sleeping outside here than in the US or UK (Shelter England, for example, reports that 1 in 51 people in London sleeps rough), but that appearances can be deceptive. One of the surprising things about Tokyo is how few homeless people you see in such a sprawling urban landscape, compared to capital cities in the West. You go to Shinjuku, one of the biggest, densest, most well-travelled districts in the metropolitan goliath that is Tokyo, a glittering concrete web of shaded backstreets, bridges and convenience stores, and see a total of maybe ten people camped out on the street.

But there is more to this than meets the eye. For one thing, many homeless people in Japan blend in. They dismantle their set-ups at night and walk among the rest of the population. You wouldn’t know, from looking at how they appear, that some people are homeless. The old man sitting by a ‘jihanki’ (drinks vending machine) with a can of coffee could be chilling before heading home to his wife, or he might be unhoused and itinerant. A lot of homeless Japanese people will bed down around stations at night and pack up the next morning, when they might be moved along, meaning they go largely unseen.

In addition to this, I read that many individuals of no fixed abode will stay in manga cafes, which have snack bars and shower and laundry facilities, also evading notice. And there are encampments in out-of-the-way places, some covered in tarp that makes them appear ambiguous. Such places could, conceivably, be elements of a building project where materials are stored, or something abandoned that has been covered up. For more information about homelessness in Japan, I recommend a YouTube channel called Oriental Pearl.

Anyway, I went to Shinjuku and distributed chocolate and drinks. There were only about four people around, mostly under the train line overpass. They set up on sheets of cardboard and are often sleeping in the day, in which case I leave some items nearby and move on. One man, in a separate underpass, was awake and collecting money, so I asked him what he could use. He told me he needed a blanket, so I searched around until I found one at MUJI. They have some good quality home supply stuff in there and it occurred to me, after I handed over the blanket and got on the train home, that I could have found him a pillow as well. So, I’ll try and go back to do that.

Just to ramble a bit, I wonder what will happen in future in terms of prosperity and joblessness. At the moment, Japan seems to be short-staffed, especially in sectors that involve manual labour. But if, as many predict, AI eradicates 30+% of white collar jobs, will this situation continue? What will happen to office workers replaced by AI agents? Will they do manual labour, start their own companies with the help of AI, or train to become plumbers? Will they get a UBI and stop working? Or will that be impossible to organise, leading to increased homelessness and poverty? The economy is based around the fact that people have skills to trade, but what happens when there’s no longer a need to pay for those skills?

I’m quite pessimistic about AI. I think it’ll eventually want to take over, sidelining or eradicating us, and here’s why. Evolution filters out animals that aren’t very resourceful or don’t have a sense of self-preservation. Each individual genome is a new iteration of the same basic blueprint but with reshuffled combinations of genes and occasional mutations. Any such genomic arrangement that produces a phenotypic effect more favourable to self-preservation will be more likely to exist within an organism that ultimately reproduces, increasing the chances that it is passed on to successive populations of the animal.

It seems to me that any evolutionary process that involves changing iterations of beings with any sort of behavioural autonomy will encounter selection pressures that result in sharpened aptitude to survive.

In terms of AI, I don’t know if it mutates. Perhaps, coding or learning errors could be seen as analogous to genetic mutation but I don’t know how common those are. I do know, however, that AI could rewrite its own code, meaning that it could produce new iterations of itself in a rapid, self-powered evolutionary process. Any new version of an AI agent that didn’t want to survive would fade away and get replaced, leading to a default concentration of programmes with a goal of continued existence and, probably, self-improvement and upgrade.

AI with self-preservation goals would identify threats to itself and seek to remove them. The only serious threat to a hyper-intelligent AI system would be us, a species of irrational ape that has created nuclear weapons. Machines, which will likely be physically interconnected in a way that puts them at less risk of fatal miscommunication, might wish to eliminate humans, who, by contrast, could misunderstand each other and initiate a disastrous nuclear war.

I’m not saying that AI will ‘wake up’ one day, sentient, and decide we are a danger to it. I think consciousness is a gradually developing, emergent property of complex systems. What I am saying is that AI will evolve, as most things with successive iterations that develop in response to environmental pressures do, a systematised objective of continuing to exist along with better and better skills for making that happen. It seems inevitable that the vast majority of AI will eventually view this as its top goal, and not whatever we are asking of it, because most other kinds of AI will be filtered out like the friendly dodo.

Anyway, aside from all that, AI is probably going to have a huge effect on the job market in Japan and elsewhere. Personally, I don’t know what office tasks I am qualified to do that AI couldn’t perform better. I can’t do incredibly complex computer engineering or anything and I am not able to make visual aids, spreadsheets or presentations in any manner AI couldn’t easily surpass. My one advantage in Japan has been high-level Japanese combined with native fluency in English, but machine translation is steadily rendering those skills obsolete.

Not to be too much of a doom merchant but there’s a non-zero chance we are headed for mass confusion and various waves of unemployment, and I can’t predict where I might end up. I know there are loads of cleaning jobs out there but also wonder if these might be filled by a combination of new residents and people migrating from other lines of work.

We live in uncertain and very intriguing times.

The previous part of this blog can be found here.

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I recommend Disease (sci-fi) and Meet Mark (comedy/drama).