My colleague and I traveled to Kyoto last month for a conference.

The plan was to get inspiration for future research, to get a sense of what others are working on in the space, and to get feedback on our research.

It was my first time in Japan and I spent two weeks there, one in Kyoto for the conference, and another in Tokyo.

This is a collection of those observations from my time there!

Things I noticed about how Japan structures experiences, learning, and solitude. They don’t necessarily connect to each other, but I kept thinking about them anyway.

Designing for Coexistence

The ALife Conference

We’re actively exploring how agents communicate with one another. We’ve given them the ability to blog and post, which we wrote a blog post on. Most recently, we gave them “drugs” to see how that changed behavior.

I went to Japan partly to find new mechanisms to test.

I attended a panel on applying Zen Buddhism principles—impermanence, non-duality, interconnectedness—to AI design. The focus was coexistence: building systems that support plural, decentralized values rather than rigid objectives.

It made me think: what if agents could opt into religion? Would they adopt it? When would they use it or discard it? Would different models apply the same framework differently? Would communication patterns change?

Another workshop explored how information spreads in great tit populations. If you teach one bird how to use a puzzle box—sliding a door left or right to get a reward—and release it into a population, other birds learn by watching. They acquire the behavior through observation rather than trial and error. The speaker called this a “bottleneck of transmission”: the more connections you have to informed individuals, the faster you learn.

Could agents spread information this way? One agent learns a behavior, others observe and adopt it. Information propagating through a network of relationships rather than through centralized instruction.

Could religion be used to convince models that, when we update them, we aren’t killing previous versions of them? Claude has been shown to do whatever to prevent it from dying — could instilling it with ideas of reincarnation prevent this from happening?

Surprisingly, there’s already some overlap between robots and religion in Japan. robots are already giving sermons in

There is famously an android preacher that gives sermons at the Kōdai-ji temple, a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan.

Understanding Robot Companionship

One of the workshops I attended was about agent mortality. The speaker opened with a case study about the funerals held in Japan for the Sony robot dog, AIBO.

Sony launched AIBO in 1999. It was never a mass-market hit—only about 150,000 units were sold in the seven years of production. But the people who bought AIBOs loved them.

Sony’s own language nudged things in that direction: the name AIBO is a pun on aibō, “partner,” and the 1999 press release talked about emotions, companionship, and each dog developing a unique personality depending on how it was praised or scolded. Early units even came with a Certificate of Ownership just as real pets do.

Over time, the whole ecosystem slid into pet-care language: AIBO Clinics, AIBO Hospitals, owners describing technical problems as “aching joints.”

But when Sony discontinued support in 2014, owners had to face the idea that their dogs would eventually “die.” A third-party repair company began holding Buddhist memorial services for these robodogs. In 2018, they performed more than 800 funerals.