Death Stranding 2: On The Beach recently released on PlayStation 5 (a PC version is inevitable but yet to be announced) and, wouldn't you know it, Hideo Kojima has seized the chance to go on the interview circuit.
As well as being a brilliant maker of games Kojima is also a master of promoting them, and knows how to raise the audience's collective eyebrow: from saying he's bummed out that playtesters were enjoying Death Stranding 2 too much to pontificating on death and declaring "I will not pass on the baton: rather, I will crush the baton."
The fawning sometimes gets all-too-much but the reality is that Kojima, for all he knows how to P.T. Barnum things, also possesses the inestimable advantage of having something interesting to say. A longtime Internet obsessive, Kojima has re-framed Death Stranding's ostensible theme of connecting people such that in the sequel the question is now whether "we" should have connected.
In a new interview with the Japanese outlet Denfaminicogamer (and spotted by Automaton West) Kojima riffs a little on his previous comments about Covid-19 and the global lockdowns: essentially that it made him think being "too connected" wasn't great. Asked to explain what this phrase means to him, the Koj-cannon is turned on AI in righteous fashion.
"Rather than being 'too connected,' I think it's dangerous to make decisions because you're being guided," says Kojima (via an edited machine translation). "I'm not denying technology but, for example, AI on my smartphone introduces me to all kinds of things. I don't like that either.
"That's because I think 'coincidences' are necessary in human life. When you wake up in the morning and go to school or work, you might happen across a coffee shop. Or you might meet someone by chance. I think it's a series of such events, and the accumulation of choices, that creates your life.
"I worry that by becoming too connected online, we will be unknowingly led into a predetermined lifestyle."
Orwell created the idea of "Newspeak" to explain how a dystopian government would control thought: by limiting language itself, and thus the ability to have complex thoughts. How much more insidious a tool these self-inserting, thought-terminating, endlessly verbose AIs that we're being bombarded with could become.
Dystopia might be a bit much. But we have travelled fast to be here. OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman recently made the absurd claim he wouldn't have known how to take care of his newborn baby without ChatGPT, and thinks it's just swell that so many young people look to a Large Language Model for life advice (even when that advice is garbage!)
"I don't feel like we should do without the Internet now," says Kojima. "It's so convenient. I think we survived the COVID-19 pandemic because of the Internet. But I think it's dangerous to become so dependent on it. I think it's important to consider how you will use convenient technology."
Ever the PR master, Kojima says his answer is spoken by a character at the end of Death Stranding 2. "I'd like you to think about my answer. It's a 'choice' of how you want to live your life using this technology."
Kojima ties a bow on all of this by emphasising the Earthiness of human reality, the roads travelled and the lives that were changed along the way. But his final shot at AI is the reference to Hawaii, and how he talks about the way another recent fad portrays it.
"As long as humans have a physical body, I think they move as individuals… you all have travelled to get here today," said Kojima to the interview audience. "It might be by car, bus, or train, or it might just be a trip back-and-forth, but during that time you'll meet a lot of different people and see a lot of different scenery.
"You can go to Hawaii in the metaverse, but it's completely different when you actually go there. First you go to the airport [here], then you get on a plane, and when you arrive there, there are smells and temperatures that you can only experience there.
"I think that such adventures add color to my life, so I don't want to lose them."
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