The fifth generation fallacy
For several years a great deal of attention has been focused on Japan's highly publicized Fifth Generation Project, a research program aimed at the development of "intelligent" computers that can think like human beings. It has been claimed that such machines are the technology of the future, and that whoever gets them first will emerge as the new leader of the world economy. In this fascinating new book, J. Marshall Unger reveals that the West has completely misunderstood Japan's interest in Artificial Intelligence. Contrary to the common view of Japan's unassailable superiority in technology and business, perpetuated recently by popular books like Japan as Number One, Unger shows that Japanese researchers are less concerned with economic coups than with solving a fundamental problem concerning their notoriously difficult written language and the challenges it poses for computer technology.^ The complex mixture of Chinese and phonetic characters that make up the script can only laboriously be typewritten and so are resistant to one of the most basic of computer functions --^ entering data into the machine's memory banks. Outlining the bewildering complexity of the Japanese script, which tested the limits of human intelligence even in bygone eras, Unger describes how in the modern age it has been the cause of disturbingly low levels of white-collar productivity and a surprisingly high degree of incomplete literacy in Japan.
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What Hacker News says
- I read this book a long time ago. It provided some insights on the role of Japan's difficulty with foreign languages in the 1980s and the desire to create AI translation. The "Fifth Generation project" was a massive government and big-business joint venture that amounted to almost nothing.
The author explores why with some surprises along the way. I would say it is like the "Mythical Man Month" from the Japanese side of computing.
The book also opened my eyes to the difficulty of mastering Japanese.
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial- Intelligence/dp/019504939X
- +1, and I’m eagerly awaiting Mullaney’s follow-on (in progress) about post-typewriter text entry.
An odd but interesting related book is Unger’s _Fifth Generation Fallacy_. If you ignore the dubious framing about 1980s Japanese AI, there’s a long discussion of kanji text entry (including computer text entry) with some kanji-specific references that _Chinese Typewriter_ necessarily skips.
- My first degree was in Japanese, mostly because I already knew how to program and had, since I was a home computer kid, been doing so for years. I did a Japanese major because Japan looked like it was going to take over the world in 1989, especially in technology. It was a foolish, foolish decision.
However, it gave me a ton of exposure to the 5th generation project, and this article is a wonderful reminder of how crazy it was, though it doesn't quite capture the insane hype around the whole thing.
There's an excellent, if imperfect, book called "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" by JM Unger (who, in a weird circumstance that makes me think the writers of our narrative are just plain lazy, a few years later, became the head of the Japanese department I was in) that talks about the project in terms that I think make quite a lot of sense.
The book talks about it, but I go even further: the 5th gen project was about Japanese beliefs about information technology and specifically that Japanese was such a complex language that the only way to have working IT was to have an intelligent machine.
Japan was still using pencils and xerox machines in the aftermath of the PC revolution in the US and Europe (in practice, this continued into the mid-90s), and had missed mainframes and minis entirely. The idea of a statistically-driven, convenient, modern input mechanism (what people use now when they use an IME, these started to show up in the mid-90s when enough of a corpus was analyzed to make them work) was not there yet; Japanese word processors of that era are incredibly cumbersome and terrible, just barely usable and not usable at all by large swaths of the work force. Japan was absolutely terrified of the technological progress in the rest of the world and a lot of it had (and has) to do with the simple inconvenience of the writing systems and the linguistic isolation.
In the cultural context, especially of the bubble that formed at the same time, and no small amount of vaguely racist beliefs about their superiority (especially linguistic, which had been going on for a very long time and played a role in Japanese relations and eventual behavior post-annexation of Korea), the 5th gen project makes perfect sense.
- An old book "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" (Unger) addresses this somewhat.
As I recall it speaks about the desire by the Japanese leadership of the time to build AI translation and related it to the challenge of full literacy in Japanese due to the requirement of learning 4 alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and Romanji.
