INTERVIEW

Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESSINTERVIEW WITH JAMES WRIGHTFebruary 2022
James Wright is a Research
Associate at the Alan Turing Institute,
the UK’s national institute for data
science and AI, where he is working ona project entitled “PATH-AI: Mapping an
Intercultural Path to Privacy, Agency, andTrust in Human-AI Ecosystems.” James’PhD in Anthropology and Scienceand Technology Studies (STS) at theUniversity of Hong Kong, completedin 2018, studied the development andattempted implementation of care robots.
He was also a visiting scholar at FFJ as
part of the Michelin Fellowship program,where he worked on a comparative studyof publicly funded care robot projects inthe EU and Japan.

Firstly, thank you for having accepted ourinterview. We would also like to congratulate
you on your current “PATH-AI” project at theAlan Turing Institute, especially for the interim
project report recently published with David
Leslie, Charles Raab, Fumi Kitagawa, Florian
Ostmann, and Morgan Briggs: “Privacy,Agency and Trust in Human-AI Ecosystems:
Interim Report”.

Could you briefly present your current
project “PATH-AI” and tell us how it cameto be?
PATH-AI is a joint project with RIKEN, Japan’slargest comprehensive research institution, and theUniversity of Edinburgh, and is supported by UK
Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Japan Scienceand Technology Agency (JST). The aim is to think about
intercultural ethics and the governance of AI throughthe lens of three key concepts: privacy, agency, andtrust.
PATH-AI started in early 2020, and as it has
unfolded over the same timeframe as the COVID-19
pandemic, this has profoundly shaped our research
approach. Responding to the societal challenges
raised by the accelerated use of data-intensive digitaltechnologies during the pandemic, we have been

examining how the complex interplay of privacy,
agency, and trust has impacted public health responses
in Japan and the UK. For example, I wrote a paper
about how the rhetoric of jishuku (“self-restraint”) was
mobilised by the Japanese government to encourageand compel public compliance with their recommended
health measures during the first year of the pandemic
despite low public trust in government.
During the first phase of PATH-AI, we conducted
remote interviews and surveys with 95 experts andmembers of the public across the UK and Japan, inorder to compare attitudes to privacy, agency, andtrust, particularly in relation to three different healthcaretechnologies: digital contact tracing apps, symptom
checking tools, and care robots. Our initial results canbe found in our Interim Report.
For the next part of our project, we are collaboratingwith Somerset House Studios and the University of
the Arts London’s Creative Computing Institute tocommission three works by international artists which
engage with the themes of our project and findings of
our interim report, and which will be exhibited virtuallyby Somerset House in late 2022. The call attracted over
200 submissions which have been both globally diverse
and of an extremely high quality, which is very exciting.
In the final phase of the project, we are planningto convene working groups comprised of stakeholders
from digital rights organizations from around the world.

Rather than creating yet another AI ethics or governanceframework, we plan to examine what is currently
the most comprehensive global AI ethics framework– UNESCO’s recommendation on the ethics of AI,
which have been adopted by its 193 member states– and explore in detail how the values and principles
expounded in the framework relate to real world casestudies viewed from intercultural perspectives. We
aim for these working groups to outlast the end of thePATH-AI project next year, and contribute to ongoinginternational and intercultural collaboration on AI ethics
and governance.

To continue with your current project, how
do you think a comparative analysis would
be favourable for research on Human-AI
Ecosystems?
To date, academic and policy discussions about AI
ethics and governance have tended to centre on EuroAmerican perspectives. Part of the aim of PATH-AI is towiden this view and consider how seemingly universalvalues like privacy, agency, and trust are understooddifferently across different cultural contexts, such as
between Japan and the UK. We hope that understanding
how these values can differ will help inform governanceand regulatory frameworks as they continue to bedeveloped, so that “Western” values aren’t simply
imposed on the rest of the world by default in a newform of informational colonialism.

broaden my professional network in France and acrossEurope, and was also supported to conduct fieldwork
in Japan, which was hugely valuable in retrospect
given the subsequent closure of the borders since
the outbreak of COVID. This enabled me to conduct
further research, maintain my relationships with existing
research contacts and build new ones, which has
greatly aided my subsequent research projects. Having
the opportunity to organize an international workshop
also provided great experience that I have been able
to build on since. I continue to collaborate with friends
and colleagues at FFJ, including via the INNOVCARE
project, and overall the fellowship provided an
extremely valuable stepping-stone between my PhD
and postdoctoral research.

In 2021, FFJ launched the INNOVCARE project:“Care-led Innovation: The case of elderly carein France and Japan”. As chair of the session
3 (“Which innovations in the field of eldercare?
An assessment based on French and Japaneseexperiences”) at the first annual conferenceof the INNOVCARE project, could you tell us
what UK experiences can have in common
with French and Japanese ones?

The UK, France, and Japan are each experiencing
similar challenges, albeit to varying degrees: aging
populations with growing care needs,
difficulties hiring and retaining care
At the same time, we want toNew carestaff, large and growing numbers of
avoid setting up binary oppositions
providing informal care, a lacktechnologies, such as peopleof East vs West, revisitingof high-quality care services orarguments about the supposedcare robots, are often difficulty maintaining them where theyuniqueness of Japanese culture, or
do exist, and an unwillingness among
framed as a possible
indeed assuming any conception
politicians (and often among theof cultures as static, monolithic or
solution to thesepublic as well) to invest in caregeographically bounded entities.
services and the people who provide
In this sense we aim to critically challenges primarily by them. New care technologies, such
but constructively engage with cutting costs and filling as care robots, are often framed as a
the concept of interculturality itself
possible solution to these challenges
the growing gaps inand how culture is being or could
primarily by cutting costs and filling
be operationalized in internationalcare services
the growing gaps in care services –governance mechanisms.
anapproachsometimes
characterized as “better than nothing”. Unfortunately,as I have found in my research to date, many of these
After your PhD, you were at FFJ as 2019 FFJ/
technologies in fact require additional human work andMichelin Fellow for your research projectgreater investment, and may not improve the quality of“Success and Failure of Public Innovation
care services or help care workers, but on the contrary
Policies in Japan. A Case Study of Careintroduce new problems, complexities, risks, andRobots”. How has this research fellowshipprecarities. I think this is partly due to a widespread lackprogram contributed to your subsequentof meaningful participatory development practices thatresearch and/or career?
involve end users in how new technologies areconceived and developed, and partly due to the lack ofThe research fellowship at FFJ was extremely
a broader perspective of care as a sociotechnicalhelpful in enabling me to consolidate my PhD researchassemblage that is reliant on social and relational
and lay the foundations for turning it into a monograph,aspects. In my view, we should be trying to cultivate,while developing and expanding my research further
foster and invest in human relationships of care rather
into other digital care technologies. I was able to“”than trying to replace them with technology. That is why
I’m excited about the INNOVCARE project’s focus on
care-led innovation, shifting the starting point forinnovation from technology to care.

“In my view, we should betrying to cultivate, foster andinvest in human relationships
of care rather than trying
to replace them withtechnology.”
What are your future projects?
I plan to continue working on healthcaretechnologies, with a particular focus on local sites andunderstandings of care. I’m especially interested inresearching the connections and disconnections
between the apparent trend, accelerated by COVID, ofreducing human social interactions as societies growincreasingly “untact”, a word South Korean
policymakers use to refer to the contactless provisionof services including elder care; what in Japan is
described as muen shakai – a “relationless society” inwhich the ties that bind have come undone; and what
Katsuno Hirofumi and Daniel White call new “technointimacies” between humans and social robots, or otherforms of commodified, technologically-mediatedinteractions with commercial products. The apparent
shift away from human communication and socialrelationships in care and across wider society seems
profound, and I wonder to what extent it is actually
being manifested, particularly outside of metropolitan
areas, and what forms of resistance may arise thatreassert the primacy of “tact-full” human interactions.

無縁社会 (muen shakai):“a “relationless society”

in which the ties that bindhave come undone”
At the same time, I aim to develop my current
research on the related subject of intercultural ethics
and governance of AI, robots, and other data-driven
technologies, examining how differing and dynamic
values and ethical approaches within and between
nations can be expressed in the global governance andregulation of these rapidly changing technologies.

The Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS warmly thanks
James Wright for accepting to answer this interview.

Further information► James Wright’s profile page on FFJ
websiteAccess: http://ffj.ehess.fr/james_wright.html► INNOVCARE - Care-led innovation: Thecase of elderly care in France and Japan
Access: https://innovcare.hypotheses.org/► Discussion Paper
ComparingtheDevelopmentandCommercialization of Care Robots in theEuropean Union and Japan
Access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/FFJ/
hal-02527652► Latest report
Wright, J., Leslie, D., Raab, C., Kitagawa, F.,
Ostmann, F., and M. Briggs. PATH-AI Interim
Report. The Alan Turing Institute.
Access: https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/
default/files/2021-12/path_ai_report_final_version.pdf► Forthcoming book
Wright, J. Robots Won’t Save Japan: An
Ethnography of Eldercare Automation. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2022.

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