Will Your Next Best Friend Be A Robot? Robots can already vacuum your house and drive your car. Soon, they will be your companions. When a robot looks like a person, we subconsciously expect it to move with the ease and speed of one. When it doesnt, our brains convey an error message. The Japanese crowd sits hushed and somber as the character on stage turns away from his co-star, an actress seated on the floor in front of a small table. He lowers his head, then turns to face the audience with a look that is both blank and inscrutable, yet somehow conveys a profound sense of alarm. Something here is very wrong. The dimly lit theater somewhere on the outskirts of Tokyo is packed. Young couples on dates, elderly theater connoisseurs, and even a few teenagers have crammed into the rickety building to catch a glimpse of the future, as visualized by playwright and director Oriza Hirata. They entered in good humor, chatting and laughing. But now they’re quietly transfixed. The character at the center of the tension is a three-foot-tall robot with an oversize plastic head faintly reminiscent of a giant kewpie doll. He is one of two robots in the play. The other has just rolled off the stage wearing a floral print apron. “I’m sorry,” the robot says, lifting a pair of orblike eyes to address the actress. “I don’t feel like working . . . at all.” The robot is depressed. In Hirata’s I, Worker, robots are more than just mechanical automatons that can vacuum and manufacture widgets. They have emotions, a development that poses challenges to both the robots and their owners. The play grapples with how to navigate such a relationship—what happens when both master and servant become depressed? It’s fiction, but Hirata’s vision reflects a dawning reality in Japan. There, scientists and policymakers see a new role for robots in society: as colleagues, caregivers, and even our friends. The glum robot is named Takeo, and by the end of the play, it’s clear he is not the only one with problems. The man of the house is unemployed and pads around barefoot, a portrait of lethargy. At one point, his wife, Ikue, begins to weep. Takeo communicates this development to his fellow robot Momoko, and the two discuss what to do about it. “You should never tell a human to buck up when they are depressed,” says Takeo, who himself failed to buck up when the man attempted to cheer him with the RoboCop theme song earlier. Momoko agrees: “Humans are difficult.” It’s not the most profound dialogue. But in a world where humans and robots live side by side, it’s not profoundly out of place either. Why wouldn’t robots pause to consider the foibles of humanity? As the crowd filters out of the theater, they turn and murmur to one another, comfortable in their personal connections. It occurs to me that for the last 30 minutes, I felt a vaguely similar connection to Takeo—a machine roughly the size and aesthetic of a particularly stylish garbage can. I even empathized with it. The strange future I came to Japan to see has already arrived. Geminoid F is seated at the front of the room like a debutante, her hands resting daintily on her lap and her long black hair unspooling down a fuzzy, green sweater. She blinks from time to time and her chest moves up and down rhythmically. She slowly scans the room, as if searching for a friend across a crowded cotillion. When her eyes meet mine, there’s a flash of recognition, and for the briefest of moments, I feel as though Geminoid F can actually see me. Perhaps she even knows me. Then her eyes move on, and the spell is broken. Instead of connected, I feel repulsed. There’s something too stiff and slow in Geminoid F’s motion, as if she is a zombie. “This robot is very humanlike compared to others,” says Hiroshi Ishiguro, the roboticist who created her. “But she is not perfect.” Ishiguro, an artist-turned-engineer, works at the extreme edge of robotics and has gained renown for eerily lifelike creations. He has a Yoko Ono–esque, avant-garde quality about him. Though we’re inside, he is wearing tinted glasses and a black leather jacket(outside it’s sweltering). He’s brushed his hair into a vaguely Beethoven-like bouffant, puffy and collar-length. Were it not for Geminoid F’s occasional birdlike movements, Ishiguro’s laboratory at Osaka University could be mistaken for the gallery of an eccentric sculptor. A perfect replica of his daughter at age 4, chubby-cheeked and in a sundress, stands in a glass display case. Other robots of various sizes and shapes stare glassy-eyed, frozen mid-gaze. For much of his career, Ishiguro has probed the conflicting emotions inspired by robots, like the affection and aversion I just felt toward Geminoid F. He says it’s the mismatch between the android’s appearance and movements that creates the “uncanny valley.” Coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s, the term describes the dread caused by a robot that comes close to human likeness but fails to fully achieve it. When a robot looks like a person, we subconsciously expect it to move with the ease and speed of one. When it doesn’t, Ishiguro says, our brains convey an error message, a neural signature that he believes he and his collaborators have identified using fMRI. It’s only a matter of time before technology, in the form of better actuators, can smoothly replicate human movement, Ishiguro says, resolving that discrepancy—and eliminating the uncanny valley altogether. Geminoid F Photograph by Luisa Whitton But what Ishiguro finds more interesting is how Geminoid F elicits the first, more ephemeral reaction—the illusion of life. She has what Ishiguro calls sonzai-kan, or a presence. “My goal is not just to create a humanlike robot,” Ishiguro tells me, “but to understand the feeling of a presence. What is that? I want to understand what is a human, and what is a human likeness.” Ishiguro gestures toward a robot that sits nearby. It’s small in stature—just over two feet tall and only seven pounds—and clearly inhuman: It has two stumps for arms and a lower-body shaped like a tadpole. But it also has eerily expressive eyes and is sheathed in a silicone material that feels smooth and pliant, like human skin. Ishiguro says he can begin to conjure sonzai-kan by activating as few as two of our senses. This robot often freaks people out, he says—until they hug it. Then their revulsion disappears. Robots with sonzai-kan can help relieve loneliness, Ishiguro believes, by providing a physical proxy that distant friends and relatives can use to interact with one another. Or they can serve as extensions of oneself. Ishiguro has already attempted to incorporate an android into his life by creating an exact replica of himself from silicone and his own hair. He sometimes uses his doppelgänger to deliver lectures remotely. Several years ago, Ishiguro grew concerned that the resemblance would fade as he aged, so he underwent cosmetic surgery and stem cell treatments to ensure a continued likeness. After he tells me this, I ask if he truly believes in the question he often puts to audiences: “Which is more me, the robot or the body I was born with?” Of course you are the real Ishiguro, I argue. “Which has the stronger identity?” he responds. “My guess is the android. Without the android, you wouldn’t come here.” But what about consciousness?, I press.“What is consciousness?” he asks. “Can you show me your consciousness. Popular Science.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 04:30:51 +0000
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