Kyosei

The emergence of AI has posed many questions around resource use and the well-being of the world beyond the technology and its creators. The AI lifecycle imposes a cost on the natural environment and on human resources, and as efforts toward expanding the use of AI continue, these costs are now pushing these resources close to, if not already beyond, a point of no return. Kyosei, a value from the Japanese philosophical ethics tradition, offers us an invitation to re-examine our engagements with AI by prioritizing the larger goal of living and working together for common good.   

Before we proceed further, we want to name the fact that Kyosei is both a broad philosophical concept in Japanese thought and a principle developed and championed in particular by Canon Corporation, which has shaped how it is understood in international business ethics. We draw on the philosophical concept while being transparent that its most visible international articulation has come through a corporate context, which in itself carries its limitations and potential conflicts of interest. What follows in this segment is an attempt to hold the genuine ethical depth of the concept while also being honest about that history.

Understanding Kyosei

Kyosei (共生) combines two characters, tomo meaning together, and ikiru, meaning to live. The term literally means “living together,” but in its philosophical and ethical usage, it describes a form of symbiosis. In this sense, it refers to the mutual flourishing of different beings, communities, and systems of relationship with each other. However, this cannot be reduced to mere coexistence, as it also includes the active and ongoing act of cultivating conditions for diverse entities to thrive together while also contributing to the conditions that make the others’ flourishing possible.

Kyosei draws on a longstanding tradition in Japanese thought, which calls for attending to the interdependent nature of living systems. It is an affirmation that no entity exists or operates in silos, and that the health of the whole is inseparable from the health of its parts. In ecological terms, Kyosei tells us that the relationships between organisms within a healthy ecosystem is informed by mutual contribution toward a shared environment that enables thriving, as opposed to competing which enables mere survival.  

In its ethical application, Kyosei asks us what our institutions owe to the larger living systems of which they are part. Whether they be businesses, governments, communities, or collectives, these institutions’ obligations do not end at their own boundaries. Kyosei challenges this assumption and reminds us that genuine flourishing calls for attending to the wellbeing of the communities, ecosystems, and relationships that make an institution’s very existence possible.

What Kyosei Unsettles in AI Governance

The development of AI development operates within a heavily competitive paradigm where companies race to build more powerful systems, nations compete for AI dominance, and the “winner-takes-all-markets” logic shapes nearly every major decision in the field. Against this backdrop, Kyosei gives us reason to pause as it asks a very important question: What is lost when symbiosis is replaced by competition as the foundational organising principle of a technology ecosystem, and what are the consequences of this for communities and natural systems that exist outside the ambit of competition?

No aspect of the AI system exists outside or apart from the living world. They are embedded in supply chains that extract minerals, consume water, and generate heat. A governance framework that is grounded in Kyosei would not treat these ecological relationships as mere externalities to be managed, but rather as the primary context within which AI’s legitimacy should be evaluated. It asks us to explore if the AI system contributes toward the conditions for mutual flourishing or extracts from them.

Kyosei offers us a vision of all that international AI governance can aspire to. It tells us that the competitive assertion of national interests and the imposition of a singular regulatory model on the world at large are not going to cut it. It tells us that the patient and committed cultivation of conditions in which different communities, nations, and knowledge traditions can contribute to and benefit from AI in ways that serve mutual flourishing as opposed to concentrated advantage will get us farther.

Kyosei asks us to explore what it would mean to build AI for symbiosis instead of for competition. It asks us to prioritise the mutual flourishing of entire living systems as a unit rather than of some within the unit at the cost of all the others. In governance, Kyosei gives us the capacity to think beyond mere corporate social responsibility and progressive taxation. It tells us to remember that genuine interdependence is the foundation, not superficial understandings, which asks us to pay attention to what we owe to the systems on which we depend and whether we are truly paying that debt.

References  

• Kaku, R. (1997). The path of Kyosei. Harvard Business Review, 75, 55-64.

• Tetsuro, W. (1996). Watsuji Tetsuro's Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan. SUNY Press.

• Kasulis, T. P., Yasuo, Y., & Yuasa, Y. (1987). The body: Toward an Eastern mind-body theory. Suny Press.

• Nakamura, H. (2021). Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan (Revised English Translation). University of Hawaii Press.