Japanese robot actress

Here's a video of a Japanese robot actress that plays the part of a caregiver to a sick patient. I was in Japan in 1996 to attend the IROS robotics conference in Osaka. I had a chance to tour the robotics labs in Tokyo University. Many of the student projects involved creating humanoid robots, the idea being that the robots would be more readily accepted by their human owners if they appeared to be human. The robots were not very sophisticated at that time.



As the population of Japan grows older due to its declining birth rate, there is apparently an effort in Japan to create a variety of robots that can perform ordinary housekeeping tasks. The play mentioned in the clip is significant for addressing the not-unrealistic scenario that robots will soon become caregivers in Japanese homes.

The Media Equation applied to sex toys

This story is so annoying I hardly know where to start talking about it. Apparently an entrepeneur has decided that adding voice response to a life-size sex doll will encourage customers to emotionally bond with his product (and thus allow his company to charge a premium price). This is the worst application I've ever seen of some already pretty questionable research, e.g., The Media Equation and the like. And I thought Aiko was creepy.

Aiko, the humanoid robot

In 1996 I attended the IROS robotics conference in Osaka, Japan as part of a group of grad student robotics researchers. We toured the robotics labs at Tokyo University (Todai). There were a lot of student projects in humanoid robots.

Here's a video of a recent humanoid robot project. It's similar to the student projects I saw, but a bit more advanced. Aiko can read (apparently) and visually track objects, react to touch, and process some natural language. Note the command language the inventor uses to control the robot: "Aiko, Japanese mode." "Aiko, trace object." These are verbal equivalents to pushing buttons on a control panel.

The entire effect of the lifelike mask, loud mechanical motors whirring, and stilted conversation is a little creepy. I think this demo is relevant to the "Uncanny Valley" hypothesis. I know it's a popular idea, that if we make our machines more "lifelike" then people will trust them and accept them, but I'm not seeing any evidence for that. I mean, look how things turned out in Blade Runner.