Power Play: Unifying Wills in Seikaisuru Kado

Getting what's in your interest is the goal of negotiations. But defeating your opponent and temporarily gaining what you want will always come back to bite you in the long term.

What's best for you is giving both parties something in their interest.

Seikaisuru Kado (Kado: The Right Answer) spends its zeroth episode by introducing us to Kojiro Shindou, and his, well, deal. He's a negotiator, and he believes in negotiation being about finding a solution that works for all parties. As opposed to, of course, the idea that negotiation is power play, entirely about imposing as much of your will as you can on the other. He buys into principled negotiation, in other words.

He's tasked to handle buying out an old, outdated factory, for a princely sum. On the face of it, this deal appears to be good for everyone involved; the factory owner and workers get a great paycheck, and the government branch he's working for gets the plot of land it's looking for. A classic solution that works for all parties, right?

Kojiro doesn't think so. He instead listens to the factory owner and employees, who, while they can't exactly turn down the cash, would much rather be able to keep working. He notices an oddity on his side: the director who authorised this particular buy is an old friend of the factory owner's, and he's dug up a decades old authorisation to push it through. And he does his research, studying up himself on the particular physics of the metalworking process the factory uses, bringing in experts he can parley his network into finding.

In the end, he's able to incent the factory workers to find a lucrative new metalworking process, one that only their skill could have developed. This makes the factory extremely valuable, letting them turn down the offer to buy it... which is not a failure, because the director confides that he was just looking to give his old buddy some retirement money.

Everybody actually wins.

What happened here? Kojiro noticed that the original deal was, despite how lucrative it looked on the surface, the government imposing its will on this factory. The government didn't actually want to buy this long-forgotten plot of land, and the factory owners didn't actually want a retirement check. Kojiro was able to make sure both parties communicated what they actually wanted, and then unify both desires into a single plan.

So isn't it fascinating, then, that one of the first things the alien entity (that represents most of the show's actual plot) tells us is this:

I desire to establish communication of wills.

I desire to secure unification of wills.

What is a negotiator? Someone who is able to represent the interests of the parties at the table. They can be good or bad at their job, depending on how well they're able to understand the will of the people involved, and how well they can unify these wills into a coherent plan.

What is a government? Well, says Kado, look at what they actually do. They're people, collectively tasked with representing the interests of the people of one country. In Kado, Japan's, at least, is reasonably good at the job. They share information with and listen to the people, and they respond quickly with task forces and new authorisations of power. They are, then, generally able to understand the will of the people, and are reasonably capable of unifying these wills into a coherent plan.

But there's a problem, says Kado, when you step up a layer further. The United Nations collectively represents the interests of its member countries, not the people within them. The "will of the country" gets ossified, resistant to change or empathy, and so the room any principled negotiator needs, to understand and unify, gets lost.

And that takes us straight back to power plays. Military power, deployed against unlimited power.

The alien lays this down for us:

Over the last several days, I have observed the things called "countries" and learned.
They function well as a device for unifying the people's will. ...But they are out of control. Countries do not eat bread.

Countries do not have wills. The people within them do.

How do you communicate and unify the will of humanity?

(You don't ask the simple questions, do you?)

Scifi, of course, has been asking this question for a while. The two most popular answers are hiveminding, and building a governance AI that somehow represents the coherent will of humanity (extrapolated volition); which both technically answer the question but often feel like they miss the point, to modern day humans.

Extrapolated volition, in particular, is fascinating; because it draws the link between the question "what is the unified will of humanity" and, well, moral philosophy. Ethics. Our species' attempt to describe what is good and right.

It makes a sort of sense, ne? Once you start to ask the principled negotiation questions at the level of the entire species, instead of geographical boundaries or individual groups of people, territorial and resource disputes start to feel less important than the impulse to make sure we all get to keep living and loving and making.

Kado seems to be building up to proposing an answer here, as well. The alien has already expressed that one of its core values is "unocle", which the show has glossed with the metaphor of sharing the bread. Which is nice and convenient, because as it turns out, that also feels like a core component of human values. There's not much compromising that either humanity or the alien have to do to make sure those particular wills are unified.

So we try to solve that problem in the first half: how do we enact the unification of wills when all parties in principle agree that this is what should be done, in an ideal world? How do we step beyond the glitches and ossified structure inherent to humanity in order to work alongside each other (and an alien) for what is right?

And then...

A word that matches approximately 51%.

What do we do when the essentially-omnipotent god-being has values that don't coincide with ours?

Let's hope we come to the right answer.