Speculative Experiments and Cybernetic Sociality:Disassembling Futures of Co-Existence in Contemporary Japan

The artificial island Yumeshima (‘dream island’) in Osaka Bay currently hosts Expo 2025. Under the theme of “Designing Future Societies for Our Lives,” Expo 2025 brands itself as a “People’s Living Lab” that showcases the sociotechnical innovations that will, hopefully, bring about “Society 5.0.” Within this performative laboratory, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro’s signature pavilion, Future of Life, invites participants to re-imagine the possibilities of co-existence through encounters with a variety of different androids and other cybernetic avatars. Importantly, these robots are not just technological curiosities that exist purely for entertainment purposes. They also play a central part in Ishiguro’s government-funded Avatar Symbiotic Society R&D project, which aims to realize a neo-cybernetic society “in which human beings can be free from limitations of body, brain, space, and time by 2050.” While it would be tempting to align with conventional critiques and dismiss Ishiguro’s visions as transhumanist dystopias, here I adopt a different approach. I treat these projects as speculative experiments and sites of future-making that are in dialogue not only with the Expo 2025 theme and Ishiguro’s scientific oeuvre, so-called android science, but also with broader historical, cultural, political, and demographic concerns in contemporary Japan. As preparation for upcoming fieldwork, this paper traces the imaginaries of co-existence that are animated by the Future of Life pavilion and the Avatar Symbiotic Society project, while offering some reflections on the reconfigurations of humanity, relationality, and autonomy that surface in their wake.