Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on New Findings in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Who Controls the State in The Anime Psycho-Pass: AI or Psychopaths: Analysis Through Jung’s Theory of Archetypes
Olga Ilina
ABSTRACT:
Theories about society’s just structure have been exciting philosophers’ minds for a long time. In the European tradition, Plato was among the first to think about this in his treatise The Republic. He proposed a model of society that would later be called utopian. Plato assumed that society should be ruled by philosophers, special people who know the way to rationally organize social life. By writing his treatise, Plato laid the foundation for an entire philosophical system based on the concept of certain ideal rational principles that should be found and tried to adhere to. As a result, adherence to the concepts of Plato and faith in the triumph of reason led European civilization to the conviction that science and progress are the very rational principles on which the life of people in the state should be organized. According to Jung in the book The Archetype and the Symbol (an anthology of his works, The Renaissance, 1991), Western civilization began to attach too much importance to the conscious, rational part of human existence in the world and chose to ignore all the negative aspects of the unconscious or tried to fight them, which led in the 20th century to bloody wars and the establishment of totalitarian regimes. At the same time, in the East, for a long time, there has been a special type of consciousness and a special archetype of an ideal ruler, a sage who does not so much oppose himself to the world of the unconscious as tries to adapt to it, to find ways to coexist with it. Jung believed that Europeans were not able to fully understand and assimilate this special type of thinking because they did not belong to the Eastern cultural tradition, but it is quite possible that if he had lived to this day, his views would have changed. Currently, we live in a global world, which is united by the Internet and world mass culture, in which not only European and American works, but also Asian ones, play an important role. The mass culture of any country in one way or another transmits the cultural values of that country, otherwise it would not be popular. mIn addition, artificial intelligence and neural networks have begun to actively develop, one of the learning channels of which is human activity in virtual space. People train neural networks with the help of their texts and requests, that is, with the help of the collective unconscious. At the same time, people involuntarily place certain hopes on artificial intelligence, including the fact that in the future it will be able to become a convenient auxiliary tool for humanity – one of the most powerful and advanced that has ever existed. There are also several concerns associated with the emergence of AI. One of them echoes Plato’s ideas about the structure of human society. AI, having access to a huge database of humanity, on the Internet, can become that very intelligent (or pseudointelligent) principle that will be able to organize the lives of people in society in the future. But what will this society be like? In Plato’s time, such a society had many good, utopian features, at least in the eyes of the philosopher himself. Modern humanity has been taught enough by the bitter lessons of history to treat utopia with skepticism. Currently, we can hardly find utopian descriptions of future societies in literature and art; instead, there are many pictures of dystopian societies in which people can also live, but by no means as cloudless as Plato imagined. One such dystopian image of a future society is presented in the Japanese anime Psycho-Pass (2012). It contains many quotes and references to various European philosophers, and in this regard is of interest to the researcher of popular culture since it presents us with a view of the problems of Western civilization from the perspective of Eastern civilization. Using Jung’s theory of archetypes, we analyze this anime and find an answer to perhaps one of the main questions of our time: what poses a danger to humanity – AI or people themselves.
keywords: mass culture, AI, dystopia, social sciences