AI as the Culmination of the Left-Hemisphere World｜Pursue the Right Hemisphere and Leave the Platforms

Every day we hear people talking about “AI.” Yet not being swept away by this flood of information, and not being weeded out in what is being called the age of AI, is actually not very difficult. Once we recognize that most of the AI talk now flooding the world is hype from people who do not really understand it, we can see, paradoxically, where the human future lies.

The reference point here is the logic of the West, which thinks in dualities. AI stands at the very culmination of modern Western logic to begin with, so if we truly want to survive, we need only strike at the structural flaw of modernity.

Something that recently struck me as a blatant illustration of this tendency is the hemisphere hypothesis put forward by Iain McGilchrist, the British psychiatrist. It is fundamentally different from the popular division of labor that spread in the 1970s and 1980s and still holds a stubborn grip, the notion that the left brain handles logic and language while the right brain handles intuition and art. What it does instead is set out the domains of the left and right brain anew, once again as a duality. And he combines this reasoning with his own neuroscience, philosophy, and literary criticism to discuss what it means to be human in the age of AI.

The core of his major works, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, is that the hemispheres differ not in what they do but, fundamentally, in how they attend to the world. All higher animals, he argues, must pay two kinds of attention at once in order to survive, two kinds that are hard to reconcile.

Put simply, the left hemisphere governs a narrow, sharp attention that isolates its object, while the right hemisphere governs a broad, open, ever-vigilant attention that takes in the whole. The first is the attention needed to peck at the food in front of you, to catch prey, or to grip a tool, and it is tied directly to the power to cut an object out of its context, hold it still, and grasp it as a “part” that can be manipulated and used. The second is the attention that senses whether a predator is creeping up from behind or how the rest of the herd is moving, and it is tied directly to the power to survey the whole context at all times and to take in the unexpected and the new, a wholeness that never stops changing.

McGilchrist argues that this double structure of attention lays the foundation of human epistemology and ontology, and he cast the left hemisphere as the “emissary” and the right as the “master,” splitting them into a duality. It is a thoroughly modern Western way of thinking, but what I find interesting is that he himself claims “AI” has seized the supremacy of the left hemisphere. To break it down a little further, the traits of the left brain are analysis, decomposition into elements, codification and rule-making, and utility, while the traits of the right brain are wholeness, tacit knowledge, metaphor, myth, embodiment, and relationship with others.

In other words, AI has simply replaced, wholesale, the modern structure made up of left-brain traits. The real source of today’s worldwide clamor that AI will destroy humanity may be a response from the system of “endless modernity.” The point is that the rise of AI is making it plain that the “human being” so long described by the modern West was in fact nothing more than a replaceable resource. As I see it, this is “the suicide of the West.”

Of course, his reasoning goes well beyond this, but as a starting point it is enough. For if AI is the ultimate embodiment of the left-hemisphere world, then we might as well hand that world over to AI altogether. Yet the modern West, and every being caught in the vortex of modernity (every way of thinking that presupposes separation), cannot arrive at this idea. The reason is that the West since modernity has placed its intelligence in precisely this domain and devoted nearly all its strength to it, and it cannot bring itself to let go.

Seen from another angle, however, a different world comes into view.

Recast in this context, the phrase “the future lies with AI” points to a future in which the left-hemisphere world is gradually unified under AI. And then the elements of the right-hemisphere world, which the left-hemisphere world has belittled and cut away, inevitably soar in value for human beings. The idea is extremely simple. As I see it, if AI accelerates toward the future, then human beings who carry the elements of the right-hemisphere world will accelerate toward the future at the same time, because the two are not separate.

So we human beings should pursue the elements of the right-hemisphere world to the very end. There is no reason, of course, for the Japanese to drag the West’s dualism along with them, so what matters is to press forward with the two held together as not separate. And this is where the choice I have been working on lately, leaving the platforms, comes into its own.

To begin with, the world is full of people who want to quit social media but cannot. As AI, the embodiment of the left-hemisphere world, accelerates, they are constantly hit within social media by waves of information on a scale never seen before, and they sink as if into a swamp, unable to get out. Because this happens slowly, like the frog in slowly boiling water, no one notices that at some point they have lost the ability to escape. But this near future is certain, and it is already showing itself.

That is exactly why, before you lose the ability to move, you should quietly finish leaving the platforms without telling anyone. Now that most people are already stuck, consulting others at every step carries the greater risk of being dragged in with them. Pulling one another down is the stock tactic of those who are on their way out. Put the other way around, if you manage it, you can move ahead without getting your feet caught in the swamp like the 99 percent, and at the same time you become easy to notice as a model for the indecisive people who are restlessly torn, wanting to get out but unable to.

Needless to say, simply leaving the platforms is meaningless in itself. It rests on the groundwork of having struggled for years with the question of “what you are,” and doing it with nothing behind it achieves nothing. But there is no need to be pessimistic either. As I said, what those who succeed in leaving the platforms actually do is extremely simple. If you look at the people quietly rising as individuals in the age of AI, you will always find one thing they have in common, and you can start by imitating it.

What they share is the figure of someone who lets AI take over more than 80 percent of the left-hemisphere world while devoting themselves wholly to the elements of the right-hemisphere world.

This is where turning McGilchrist’s argument around pays off. He stresses that because AI has “no body, no emotions, no soul, and no awareness of death (finitude),” it can never understand essential context or the depth of reality. If so, then that is exactly what human beings should commit themselves to. The keywords of the twenty-first century that rise to the surface here are philosophy and religion. Human beings have bodies, emotions, souls, and an awareness of death, and that is precisely why they will need philosophy and religion more and more the further AI accelerates.

So, since he himself says that the traits of the right brain are wholeness, tacit knowledge, metaphor, myth, embodiment, and relationship with others, human beings should take these up, each within their own natural gifts. To put it more radically, go to places in person and gather firsthand information, take your own photographs and videos, and put what you felt into words. Then place it not on an existing platform but in a world you have built yourself. All you need to do is keep this cycle turning. In several languages, if you can.

Seen this way, it is clear that this era has brought the age of social media, when “everyone is a creator,” to a close. What it asks of us instead is for everyone to become an independent researcher, with a theme to lose oneself in and pursue without end, and to publish the results from outside the platforms. That is all it comes down to. In other words, the same work can lead to different futures. However great one’s talent in some field, those who keep depending on existing platforms and social media to publish will be weeded out, and those who can place their work somewhere they built themselves will rise.

Long ago, in Japan’s Warring States period, in a world in chaos, many hot-blooded young men threw down their hoes, took up swords, and left their villages, aspiring each to become the lord of a castle and a domain of his own. At the end of it all came the battle that decided the realm. Today, each of us holds in our hands a weapon that can lift us onto the global stage in a single stroke. In that sense, it is an extremely “democratic” moment.

There is only one thing I want to ask. Will you use that weapon merely to look things up and ask for advice, or will you use it to move seriously ahead of the times? We are entering an age of upheaval in which billions of people wield the same weapon and rise all at once, each aiming to become the lord of a castle of their own. The battle that decides the realm begins now!