Hideo Kojima—a man known for making some strange-but-interesting choices with game design in franchises like Death Standing and Boktai—has spoken about the future of technology, and how a world without AI isn’t one that’s possible anymore. In an interview with Nikkei Xtrend, as caught by GamesRadar, Kojima compared the rise of AI to that of smartphones. Noting that smartphones when they first came out weren’t as widely used, he believes AI technology is in a similar place right now.
“When smartphones came out, everyone slated them,” Kojima said in the interview. “But now there are so many people who can’t live without their smartphones. AI is like that. It’s important to use technology in a way that will make us happy… I think there isn’t any point in saying ‘We shouldn’t use AI’ or ‘AI is useless.’ We can’t go back. Smartphones were the same.”
When it comes to future uses of AI technology, Kojima points out that a person that isn’t good at face-to-face communication with others could make use of AI to bridge that gap and grow closer with others. The technology in general, he believes, has the potential to “greatly change” how humans communicate with each other.
“There’s a possibility that the spread of AI will greatly change how we communicate,” he said. “There are people who aren’t good at speaking face-to-face, and with AI compensating for this, maybe they could grow close with others… It would undoubtedly be convenient.”
Kojima does note that the technology definitely has a downside, since it might have downsides to how people use it to communicate with each other. To avoid this, he said that its use for human communication should have limits that people put on themselves. “I get the feeling humans would become spoiled,” he said. “So, we’d need to do things like reduce the AI’s involvement, or have days where we don’t use it.”
In the same interview, Kojima also spoke about his upcoming horror title OD. While he noted that he couldn’t go into too many details about the title, he did mention that, while the game looks like horror, “the system it uses isn’t ordinary.”
“I think when you first see OD it looks like horror,” he said. “But the system it uses isn’t ordinary. Everything is made in a game engine, and a game is a game, but it’s still a system like no other. That’s why we built a completely new medium together with Microsoft.”
He has, however, seemingly hidden some clues in the “Knock” teaser trailer that was released back in September. He said that people should watch the trailer “100 times” to find a “big hint” about what OD might be about.
“I can’t say anything else or Mr Phil [Spencer] will be mad at me,” he says. “But actually, if you watch the teaser trailer many times there’s a hint. I really can’t say what it is, but if you watch it 100 times… At the end of the trailer it reads ‘for all players and screamers’. That’s also a big hint.”
OD is being developed for PC and Xbox Series X/S. It doesn’t yet have a release date, however.
