Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

How “STAR WARS” and the Japanese Artificial Intelligence (AI) Threat Led to the Internet, Part II

Posted on | November 28, 2010 | No Comments

In Part I of this series, I wrote about how the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” provided a major funding boost to the development of “artificial intelligence” and particularly the networking capability to connect supercomputers that was a crucial step in transforming an obscure military network called the ARPANET into the Internet and its World Wide Web.

The 1982 Japanese announcement of their intention to lead computer-based AI development seriously alarmed US policymakers. In addition to becoming a significant economic and financial threat to the US, Japanese advances in electronic computing appeared to pose a new threat. Washington, particularly the so-called “Atari Democrats,” who saw “high technology” as a major US strategic advantage for the US economy and its defensive stance in the world, took action.

The Japanese AI Threat

Along with the threat of nuclear war with the USSR, the other major paranoia that spurred US government involvement in new data communications technology was the Japanese plans to develop artificial intelligence (AI) outlined in an Addison-Wesley publication. Named the Fifth Generation by Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck in their book with the same name (1983), they weaved a story about advancements in Japan’s computing and information industry policy. Japan's AI projectSubtitled “Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World,” they argued that knowledge industries were becoming “The New Wealth of Nations,” a term with origins in Adam Smith’s classic book (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Japan was seen as a significant trade threat with its automobile industries and electronics, such as its Betamax video cassette recorder (VCR), which dominated the market since it was first marketed in 1975. The book caught the attention of concerned Washington policymakers, who set out to work on a legislative response.

By the early 1980s, the US was beginning to experience massive global trade deficits, especially with Japan. Deficits increased rapidly during Reagan’s first years, from a negative US$28 billion in 1981 to $36 billion in 1982 to $62 billion in 1983 (rising to US$160 billion in Reagan’s last year, despite a dramatically stronger yen).[1] These were partially sparked by the so-called “Reaganomics” – tax cuts and increased government spending, which created domestic demand beyond the manufacturing capabilities of a “deindustrializing” US. Reagan was also a strong proponent of free trade and promised to veto any trade protection legislation. In addition to a major recession at the time, trade deficits became a major economic concern for US policymakers, and computers were still a major export.

The US government and interested domestic sectors were concerned that Japan was making its way into “value-added” industries, including chip-making, computer design, upscale automobiles, and financial sectors, by exploiting certain advantages. Japan appeared to be aggressively moving toward the more promising high-technology areas and pulling out of areas such as bare steel, shipbuilding, and textiles. With a rapidly growing salary base and a heavy reliance on imported oil and other materials, Japan allowed other countries with lower labor and other resource costs to pick up these industries, often with their investment monies.

Japanese companies were also seen to have benefited from protected home markets, considerable support from the government, superior quality control, and a social structure that allowed them to work together more efficiently. Although dismantled after World War II, their corporate structure still retained the legacy of the zaibatsus, “families” of companies organized around a bank that worked together to break into foreign markets and gain market share. They were helped considerably by many of their banks’ rapid ascendance into the top 20 largest banks in the world.

The US was also concerned that MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) aggressively led their export industries, and conducted extensive market analyses of foreign markets and coordinated trade activities. Japan had become a major export power, and their government intervention was under increasing scrutiny by the US. Japanese semiconductor manufacturers, for example, were making inroads into US markets and were being accused of “dumping” them illegally at prices below costs.[2] However, their threat of developing an artificial intelligence system struck the most fear in US lawmakers.

With the establishment of the Institute for New Generation Technology (ICOT) in April 1982, the Japanese announced their interest in developing a new generation of computers that would be intelligent and could converse with humans in “natural language.” They would be able to “learn, associate, make inferences, make decisions, and otherwise behave in ways which we have always considered the exclusive province of human reason.”[3] The new generation would go way beyond the earlier computer generations that were based respectively on electronic vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, and very large integrated microprocessors (VLSI). The “Fifth Generation” would go beyond VLSI to produce “supercomputers” based on new concepts in parallel architectures, programming languages, storage techniques, and ways of handling symbolic and other non-alphanumerical information.[4]

The fear of Japan’s entry into the computer and network technologies mobilized the US government to take action during the 1980s to ensure that the technological edge in computerization and data communications stayed with American interests. In the next section, I will examine how Al Gore and the other Atari Democrats “took the initiative to create the Internet.”

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2018, Sep 27) How “STAR WARS” and the Japanese Artificial Intelligence (AI) Threat Led to the Internet, Part II. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/how-star-wars-and-the-japanese-artificial-intelligence-ai-threat-led-to-the-internet-japan/

Notes

[1] US deficit figures from Daniel Burstein’s (1988) Yen! NY: Simon and Schuster. p. 123.
[2] Japanese “dumping” chips on US markets from Paul Kennedy’s (1987) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. NY: Random House.
[3] Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, (1983) The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. p. 12.
[4] Feigenbaum, E. A. and McCorduck, p. 5.

Share

Anthony

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at The State University of New York, Korea (SUNY Korea) and a Research Professor at Stony Brook University.

Category: artificial intelligence, how IT came to rule the world
Tags: > > > >

Comments

Comments are closed.

  • Referencing this Material

    Copyrights apply to all materials on this blog but fair use conditions allow limited use of ideas and quotations. Please cite the permalinks of the articles/posts.
    Citing a post in APA style would look like:
    Pennings, A. (2015, April 17). Diffusion and the Five Characteristics of Innovation Adoption. Retrieved from https://apennings.com/characteristics-of-digital-media/diffusion-and-the-five-characteristics-of-innovation-adoption/
    MLA style citation would look like: "Diffusion and the Five Characteristics of Innovation Adoption." Anthony J. Pennings, PhD. Web. 18 June 2015. The date would be the day you accessed the information. View the Writing Criteria link at the top of this page to link to an online APA reference manual.

  • About Me

    Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.

    You can reach me at:

    apennings70@gmail.com
    anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr

    Follow apennings on Twitter

  • About me

  • Writings by Category

  • Flag Counter

  • Pages

  • Calendar

    February 2025
    M T W T F S S
     12
    3456789
    10111213141516
    17181920212223
    2425262728  

  • Disclaimer

    The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of my employers, past or present.