There is an interesting question we rarely ask when we talk about our relationship with artificial intelligence and robots: how much of our reaction to technology is actually technological, and how much of it is cultural?
Many of us in the West grew up inside a worldview deeply influenced by Christian philosophy, whether we are religious today or not. Embedded in that tradition is a powerful idea about creation: humans should be careful about creating something in the image of God. The ambition to manufacture life, intelligence or consciousness has often been accompanied by a sense that we are crossing a boundary that perhaps should not be crossed. You can see echoes of this in the old stories of the Golem, in Frankenstein, and today in many of our anxieties about artificial intelligence.
Now compare that with Japan and the influence of Shinto. In Shinto, the boundary between animate and inanimate is much less rigid. The world can be inhabited by spirit: a tree, a stone, an object, and by extension even a machine can have something similar to a "soul" and participate in a world that is not divided quite so brutally between things that are "alive" and things that are merely "objects."
That creates a fascinating cultural difference when technology becomes increasingly human-like. If your philosophical inheritance tells you that creating an intelligent machine is dangerously close to playing God, the robot easily becomes a threat. If your cultural inheritance allows you to imagine that objects themselves can possess spirit or presence, the idea of living alongside an intelligent machine may feel considerably less alien.
Perhaps this helps explain why robots have historically occupied such a different place in Japanese popular culture than in much of the West. One tradition instinctively asks whether the machine will replace us, overpower us or become something we should never have created. The other has more room to ask how the machine might coexist with us.
That becomes particularly interesting in the age of AI, because the biggest barriers to technological adoption are rarely technological for very long. Eventually, the technology works. What remains are our assumptions about intelligence, agency, consciousness and what it means to be human.
Maybe the most important question about AI is therefore not whether machines can become more like us. It is whether our inherited definition of what is allowed to be intelligent is broad enough for the world we are creating.