KDDI’s Nexaware Nexa Warehouse Optimiser launched in April 2024 and is being marketed as a system for improving efficiency during labor shortages.
This video case study is in Japanese and YouTube will provide machine-translations of what is spoken in the video.
I recommend watching it the first time without translation (assuming you don’t speak or read Japanese) and just watch the ways in which people and machines are interacting with one another. Also note what kinds of visualizations and on which screens these visualizations are happening.
Their system has been designed to manifest a worksite in which there is “no thinking, no walking, no holding, and no waiting.”
Of course this cybernetic system is a model of governance. Some may not be aware that “cybernetic” and “govern” share the same root word, the ancient Greek κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs) meaning “helmsperson.”
Being a model of how to govern, I can’t help but reflect on the kinds of people who would live in that world. My reflecting is perhaps a Confucian impulse.
I reflect on what my life would be like when I have “no thinking, no walking, no holding, and no waiting.”
We read Nietzsche aphoristically, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth,” and understand that a world without walking would be a world without thoughts worth trusting. Or maybe that thinking is not afforded to us in a world in which we cannot consummate the relationships between ourselves and the heavens and the earth.
What kind of person is not holding others? This person would have no companions (literally no one with whom they share bread). Or maybe we might ask ourselves “what kind of companion ought I be?” Surely the companion worth being is a person who holds up what is best in those around them. Like a dog.
I had a roommate in my twenties who once told me that his father taught him an important life lesson: “Waiting builds character.” Over the years I’ve metabolized that phrase and I think it has served me well. Strength of character cannot be purchased except through the cultivation that is afforded to us in the fullness of time.
Isn’t that Berryman’s lament, that heavy-bored cyborg, in “Dream Song #14“
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so
[….]
my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
I can’t mention Berryman’s poem and not mention another roommate from my twenties, Damon Hooks. Damon made me aware of Berryman and this specific poem. Damon always had these wonderful associations when we’d talk, a delightful collaborator.
I read “Dream Song #14” again now and note that a dog has brought us away from the bored. Of course it was a dog.
Jason Wirth once told my friends and I that dogs are Nature’s mute cypher (see his “Caught Looking: Philosophy and the Provocation of Milan Kundera“). Jason pointed us to Simic’s “A Letter,” in which a dog waits for Bob’s father who has been moving with pain. Jason also had us look at the dogs in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being as well. And how’s this for a moment of “Chinese Whispers“?
Anne Raver, in a 1994 gardening column for the New York Times (mis)quotes The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “Dogs are our link to Paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.” (emphasis added)
The trees make thinking difficult in “A Letter” but it is a certain kind of thinking, isn’t it? The poem begins,
Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.
Is it the same with you?
That sadness is summoned by what is seen and it seems that the world conspires against the nominal letter writer who wants to sink teeth into the noumenon but ultimately is caught by their own looking at the world, the “bare trees with an infinity of tragic shapes” that make thinking [about the noumenon] difficult. Sitting here today I imagine Jason telling us, twenty years ago, that this kind of noumenal thinking would lead only to this sadness because this kind of noumenal thinking masks the world with a false abstraction of the truth of the world.
My birthday is coming up soon. For a number of years now I have made it my habit to read David Berman’s “Self-Portrait at 28” on my birthday. It’s a long poem and I love it, but here I will share only a section:
I walked out to the hill behind our house
which looks positively Alaskan today,
and it would be easier to explain this
if I had a picture to show you,
but I was with our young dog
and he was running through the tall grass
like running through the tall grass
is all of life together,
until a bird calls or he finds a beer can
and that thing fills all the space in his head.
You see,
his mind can only hold one thought at a time
and when he finally hears me call his name
he looks up and cocks his head.
For a single moment
my voice is everything:
Twenty years, almost exactly twenty years, ago.
I’m sitting here in Atlanta, enjoying the warmth of several friends in this writing.
Worth waiting for at least another twenty years.