いいんだか、悪いんだか

Yesterday, I turned 52.

After living for more than half a century, I no longer attach any particularly profound meaning to my birthday.

I returned home from Tokyo and cooked dinner as usual.

Since it was my birthday, however, I decided to make it slightly more special. I bought three bone-in chicken legs, like the kind often served at Christmas.

One for my father-in-law, one for my wife, and one for me.

The person celebrating his birthday cooked dinner for everyone else.

It felt a little odd, but there was nothing wrong with it.

⸻

Before we began eating, my wife said to her father,

“Today is Yuki’s birthday.”

My father-in-law looked at me and asked,

“How old are you now?”

“52.”

He replied with something like,

“I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.”

I could not help laughing.

He had a point. I was not sure whether it was good or bad either.

After that, my father-in-law said nothing more.

He simply ate the dinner in front of him, quietly, as he usually does.

⸻

The era through which my father-in-law has lived was hardly a peaceful one.

There was the turmoil following the war, followed by Japan’s period of rapid economic growth.

People’s lives became more prosperous, and the structure of society changed dramatically.

Then came the collapse of the economic bubble and the long years of stagnation that followed.

Looking back, his life has unfolded through an extraordinarily eventful period.

Yet the changes we are about to experience may be even greater.

⸻

The world has changed enormously during the 52 years I have been alive.

The internet appeared and gradually became an ordinary part of everyday life.

Then smartphones arrived. Shopping, booking, paying, and searching for information can now be completed almost entirely through a small device held in one hand.

Travel alone shows how much things have changed.

We once booked trains and hotels over the telephone and spread out timetables and maps to plan where we were going.

When traveling abroad, we had to ask people for directions in places where we did not speak the language, finding our way through trial and error.

It required an amount of time and effort that is now difficult to imagine.

Today, a smartphone tells us train times, where we are, and how to reach our destination.

Bookings, payments, and translations can all be handled on the spot.

And now AI has arrived.

⸻

A few days ago, I was editing footage from the two-hour conversation I hosted on August 22.

I synchronized footage from three cameras, adjusted the audio, added subtitles, and created a 20-minute digest.

I corrected mistranscribed captions, refined the transitions between chapters, and redesigned the thumbnail again and again.

Until recently, this was the kind of work I would have needed to outsource to a professional, followed by repeated discussions and revisions.

Instead, I was doing it at home on my computer, consulting with AI as I worked.

Only a few years ago, I could never have imagined myself doing such a thing.

We often hear that AI will take people’s jobs.

And it probably will perform many tasks that once required a great deal of human time and effort.

Yet I feel less that something is being taken away from me and more that I am becoming capable of doing things I could never do before.

⸻

The definitions of things themselves are being rewritten one after another.

What does it mean to work?

What does it mean to learn?

What does it mean to be an expert?

The changes ahead may happen several times, perhaps even dozens of times, faster than those my father-in-law experienced.

As I considered all of this, he sat across from me, quietly eating his roasted chicken leg.

He is someone who has witnessed countless changes, from the postwar years to the present day.

⸻

Next year, I will turn 53.

I have no idea how society will have changed by then or what I will be doing.

Perhaps I will once again cook my own birthday dinner.

And perhaps my father-in-law will ask my age and say,

“I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.”