Lessons from Po-A | Jin Nakazawa, Assistant to the Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies / Director, Shonan Fujisawa ITC / Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
2023.02.14
Listening to classical music at the end of the year reminded me of Po-A. At Keio University Shiki Senior High School, which I dearly love, the brothers Takashi Shinbo and Masashi Shinbo used to teach music long ago. Here, for the sake of convenience, but with gratitude, I will refer to Mr. Takashi as Po-A and Mr. Masashi as Po-B. Regarding the teachings of Po-B, I have a memory of writing about them somewhere, but I can't find it no matter how much I search, so I may write about it again someday. Po-A, on the other hand, was an opera singer, and when the whole school sang the Juku-ka, his beautiful voice made the very air vibrate intensely. He taught us to sing by imagining opening every orifice in our bodies wide and feeling the crown of our heads being pulled vertically upwards. When I tried it, I found I could indeed sing in a way that sounded something like that.
This same Po-A shared his thoughts on how the advancement of transportation might be leading to shorter careers for opera singers. Opera is a form of content that comes together with a large orchestra and many singers and dancers, so performances in various locations involve the travel of all these people. Until the 19th century, such travel was typically done by train or ship—that is, slowly—so a long break accompanied each performance. However, in the 20th century, when airplanes made it possible to travel the globe in an instant, short-term world tours became possible. As a result, opera singers overuse their voices. Po-A's concern was that they might use up their voices before they could mature with age. He mentioned "The Three Tenors," saying that they were singing too much while still young.
The Three Tenors were active until quite recently, so Po-A's concern may have fortunately been unfounded, but something similar is now happening on the internet. Video-sharing sites are enabling a completely different kind of content consumption than before. Taking comedy content as an example, when I was a child, after watching the 8:00 p.m. Saturday show, we had to wait a whole week for the next one. But now, because so many "neta" (comedy routines) are uploaded to video sites (including illegal ones), viewers can watch them whenever they like. As a result, the routines become old in a flash and are consumed in an instant. If you think of one week becoming one second, you could say that consumption has accelerated by about 600,000 times. Conversely, you could also say that the chances for new comedians to have their big break have increased just as much.
This also applies to university classes. Just as the viewing space has expanded from television studios to internet video sites, the learning space at universities is also expanding from the classroom to online distribution systems. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems many faculty members smoothly conducted live and on-demand classes. And based on casual conversations with faculty from other universities, it appears that students who say, "I can listen to on-demand classes at triple speed!" exist at every university. I feel that hearing and understanding are two different things, but in any case, both faculty and students are discovering new possibilities in the online learning space. From now on, automatic translation by AI will likely become easier and more accurate. Moreover, general-purpose AIs like ChatGPT, which learn from massive amounts of language data and can answer various questions in various languages, have already appeared.
Thinking this way, it seems that university classes must continuously incorporate future technologies and innovate. Even current general-purpose AI can answer questions at the level of a student assistant (or even a faculty member, depending on the content), so for material found in textbooks, an AI SA or AI instructor is already possible. For example, in the field of information science, if you ask ChatGPT, it will give you a program that actually works. AI can write programs. This means that research and education where faculty continue to create new things not found in textbooks, and where students think for themselves, will become more important than ever. Furthermore, with automatic translation, if a class is recorded and distributed in one language, it can be viewed in various other languages. Not limited to classes, cross-lingual communication will become superficially possible, which might reduce the motivation to learn other languages. If that happens, language education, including the deepening of understanding of other cultures and countries, is likely to become very important.
I felt that there are surely many possibilities beyond these, and that each one presents an opportunity for innovation at SFC. And so, I am grateful for the teachings of Po-A, which gave me these few minutes of thought at the end of the year.