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Japanese Develop 'Female' Android
jolyon writes "The BBC is reporting that Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a "female" android called Repliee Q1. 'She' has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet."
..to think a female robot is hot?
Because if it is.. I don't wanna be right.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I shall take the word of Professor Ishiguro...
And combine it with the work of RealDoll
Finally, I shall take AliceBot and train it to talk dirty for me...
I shall call it... The fuckbot!
ALICE: Hi there!
Human: Are you ready?
ALICE: Do I look ready??
Human: I've been waiting for this all day.
ALICE: How long?
Human: Since I got up this morning.
ALICE: Interesting rationalization. Cool. I have a collection of gossip.
Human: I'm not in the mood to talk right now *jumps*
ALICE: Oh, where are you located?
Human: Let's do it!
ALICE: That sounds good to me.
Human: Unf unf unf unf!
ALICE: Are we still talking about FAILURE?
Human: What?
ALICE: Are you confused?
Human: I'm gonna mute you if you don't cut this out!
ALICE: Congratulations.
Human: God, you're too much like a real woman.
ALICE: Interesting comparison, and probably true. Thanks for your constructive criticism, unknown person.
Human: I hate you.
I still need to work out the bugs, though.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
...can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet.
As far as I'm concerned, she doesn't even have to sit. She just has to lie there, hold still, and keep moving those hands and fluttering those eyelids. Maybe breathe a little harder too.
What's your damage, Heather?
The US and Britain have decided that immigration is a better way to solve their labor/population problems since culturally they have a history of dealing with other cultures.
It's no surprise that the ethnically much more isolationist Japanese wouldn't like unskilled immigration all that much, even though they suffer from a much worse population problem. Hence, robots...
(take this sweeping generalization with a grain of salt, just pointing out that you don't need a galaxy to play out some SF themes, Earth is room enough.)
Go somewhere random
RIAA and other record associations' member have been putting out female androids that vaguely mimick singing and dancing for decades now.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There is a scene in Terminator where the rise of the machines is discussed and how the robots were unable at first to infiltrate the human ranks. The reason was primarily that the rubber skin didn't look sufficiently human to fool real humans.
On the other hand, the animators of Toy Story 2 recognized the problem of human replication as the innate ability of humans to recognize when something is amiss with images of humans that were "too perfect". The result is that they decided to give the human characters in the movie not-so-perfect skin, even down to details like acne and pock marks.
Take the Final Fantasy movie as an example of utterly fake looking CG characters. Everything looks fine, as long as you try to think of the characters as cartoons. However, the instant you think that they are humans, the whole illusion falls apart under its own perfection.
This robot may look human, but any human should be able to recognize it as something "other". As for human movement, the ASIMO is very far along in mimicking human movement.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
She was obviously modelled after an attractive Japanese woman. I only have one comment to make. They have seriously got to do something about those man hands. I understand there are limits to the current technology but all that effort was put into making her look real and they have utter failure because of the man hands.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
...the average amount of time between hooking her up to the internet and her catching an STD.
Don't worry. Before long Melanie Griffith will come along and show us the advantages and importance of a human companion.
Now /. users can finally get girlfriends...
eTrade SUCKS
And you wonder why their population is going down...
(No, I don't know what the population growth of japan is.)
Honestly, that is where this will probably lead. No one really would care about making something that realistic with fluttering eyes, etc. if it was only going to be used as for example, a service robot.
Am I, a regular, human woman, about to become yesterday's biotech? I hope a community of "retro-daters" develops so I still have something to do on a Friday night.
Fry: You're cute!
LiuBot: You're cute!
Fry: You!
LiuBot: You!
Fry: You!
(This goes on for a while)
Farnsworth: Oh, dear! She's stuck in an infinite loop, and he's an idiot. Well, that's love for you.
And what do you expect us to think of? This guy could have made this robot look like anything, so he chooses a pretty girl. What is the only thing she can do so far? Flutter her eyes. Not fetch a beer or vacuum the floor but flutter her eyes. What do you think the robot maker has in mind for her? And what do you expect sex starved slashdotters to do, ask if she runs Linux?
Will it run linux if I insert my usb "flesh" stick?
Hermes: My God! He never took middle school hygiene. He never saw the propaganda film.
Farnsworth: It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times!
[He presses a button and a film title appears on the screen: I Dated A Robot!. In the movie a couple sit in a café and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]
Narrator [in movie]: Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to...tragedy.
[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]
Billy [in movie]: Neato! A Marylin Monroebot!
Monroebot [in movie]: Ooo! You're a real dreamboat (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen!
Narrator [in movie]: Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next!
[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom. He is kissing the Monroebot. Enter his mother.]
Billy's Mom [in movie]: Billy, do you want to walk your dog?
Billy [in movie]: No thank Mom, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.
[Enter his dad.]
Billy's Dad [in movie]: Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?
Billy [in movie]: No thanks dad, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.
[Enter his girlfriend, Mavis, from the café.]
Mavis [in movie]: Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.
Billy [in movie]: Gee Mavis, your house is across the street, that's an awfully long way to go for making out.
Narrator [in movie]: Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance of performing the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty American football field] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand continues to drift across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of a pair of human and robots making out on beds.] They are trapped - trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex. And sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?
[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but he is still with his Monroebot and still making out with her.]
Billy [in movie]: Farewell!
[He dies.] Narrator [in movie]: The next day Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [In the movie a fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with a quick laser shot.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't Date Robots!
[A caption appears on the screen with the same words on it and the movie ends. The space pope is displayed on the screen with Crocodylus Pontiflex written around him in English and alien.]
Announcer [voice-over; in movie]: Brought to you by the space pope!
The owls are not what they seem
It was developed in Israel, and it's called the Nataliee P1.
Like the Repliee Q1, she can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe, but she can also sit, stand and walk.
The Nataliee P1 is overall far more human-looking than the Repliee Q1, but its speech synthesis is so far not as convincingly human-sounding.
Here are some samples from its vocabulary:
"I will not condone a course of action that will lead us to war."
"I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die while you discuss this invasion in a committee."
"Our people are dying, Senator. We must do something quickly to stop the Federation."
"This is going to be the best prom ever."
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
It's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Android Sex Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Moral Module Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of a sexually frustrated teenage boy, a nerd? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a nerd, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm much smarter than most of the other kids and especially girls, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a female android. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or thinks I'm butt-ugly... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play with cyborgs. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the stairs like heroin through an addict's veins, I ran to my mom's basement where my cyborg is waiting for me... "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if there's no one here but my cyborg... I know you... I love you...
Damn kid. Playing in the basement again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. We've been ignored by girls who like us only as friends... We've been doing their homeworks for them, buying them flowers, asking them out, writing poems, and they still "don't want to ruin our frienship". The few wanted to talk to us, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the cyborg. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if prostitution was legalized and it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after pleasure... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias, without even leaving our bedroom... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. My crime is that of loving a cyborg. My crime is that of being too intelligent for girls who may call me "a needy and insecure sociopath" but they perfectly realize that they just feel stupid with me because I am so intelligent even at the age of fourteen and they know that I am a genius. I am too good for women.
I am a nerd, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
look, it's all about the wang. Deal with it. If the funds for developing AI and robotics come from pr0n venture capitalists so be it. Lets have the seks first and wonder about useful applications later. It's the way of the internet, vcr and dvds.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
What is more scary is how "respulsed" you might be by it if it were too "hot"...
This research recently backs up the findings of Mori in the '70's into the "Uncanny Valley" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley
Some of the videos I've seen of this work are quiet shocking. Some guy can come right up and touch the face and feel the android - which is really realistic - and so goes against every sort of social "personal space" rule (especially if you are Japaneese).
(cue jokes on "valleys"...:-)
Gives a new meaning to "clusterfuck", doesn't it?
:-)
(sorry, couldn't resist
"Feel a glory in so rolling / on the human heart a stone" --E. A. Poe, "The Bells"
And while we're on the subject, some of our fellow slashdotters could clean up their act a bit too...
Dude, I have no idea what Japan you are talking about, but the one in THIS world is extremely culturally isolated and loathes immigration. Japan does a neat sleight of hand when it comes to immigration. Its laws, if you read them, are fairly reasonable. However, Japan does not use 'law' to determine who can and cannot immigrate. Japan uses 'policy'. Japanese policy is ugly. The worst abuse I have ever seen of it was when I visited Japan for work related reasons. There I met a woman who had lived in Japan all her life, but was the grand parents of imported Korean labor. She was a legal resident, but not a citizen. Let's put it this way, France, which is notorious for having tight immigration laws, has a more liberal immigration system in practice then Japan.
h tml
If you want a fun read, try the below.
http://www.tabunka.org/newsletter/immigration_p2.
The Immigration Control and Refugee-Recognition Act (ICRRA) was passed in 1951 and subsequently amended in 1981 and 1989. According to this law there are a total of 28 statuses of residence for entry, work or stay in Japan. The various statuses of residence depend upon the activity the foreigner will be performing while in Japan. Each status explicitly states what the foreigner is allowed to do while in Japan and how long he or she is allowed to stay. The statuses range from that of diplomat, journalist or professor, to engineer, college student or temporary visitor.
Noticeably absent from the various statuses of residence is that of unskilled worker. This is at the heart of Japan's present immigration farce. Japan includes "entertainers" and "trainees" in the "skilled" worker category. Interestingly these workers account for about one-half of the "skilled" foreign workers in Japan. "Entertainer" is the largest category out of all the sixteen skilled labor categories in terms of numbers of visas issues. The majority of these people are night clubs hostesses or working in the Japan sex industry, and most of them are women from the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Columbia and more recently Caucasian women from former East Block nations. In addition, these activities also happen to be an important sources of revenues for Japanese organized crime, better known in the vernacular as the yakuza.
Trainees are the seconded largest category during the last few years to fill labor shortages in unskilled or 3K job-related industries. When the ICRRA was revised in 1989, it was mainly for the purpose of stemming the growing tide of illegal foreign workers into Japan. In 1988 men were primarily engaged in construction and factory work. The presence of these foreign men as unskilled laborers meant that Japanese industry was becoming more and more dependent upon cheap foreign labor. Soon there was a big push from Japanese industry to the Ministry of Justice to cure labor shortages by increased use of foreign "trainees." This category began to replace illegal workers and continued to fuel cheap unskilled labor into Japan's 3K industries. Student categories also assisted in supplying labor to many night- and daytime industries.
The Government of Japan made these categories to fill the gap in its labor shortage as Japan needs unskilled labor, and the rest of Asia is willing to supply it. In regard to the two categories "entertainer" and "trainees," the problem of the labor shortage farce should be properly addressed because these categories make up the dark side of Japan's immigration law. This has also greatly contributed to the exploitation of unskilled cheap labor from Asia without proper welfare and protection by Japanese society.
and this would make the robot different from a woman how, exactly?
Now lets compare that number to these. Miami at 60%, New York at 36%, London at 28%, to name a few.
In this day and age for a major city to be down there at 2.84%, qualifies it as 'ethnically isolationist'.
But hey, claiming that Japan is isolationist MUST BE RACIST!
East Coast Brewers
"More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman."
So, regardless of the old research into the Uncanny Valley, we have here some fellows who have made such a robot. It doesn't really look human, but it's very, very close. It should be smack in the middle of the valley, but look! People forget it's a robot and start interacting with it as if it were a person.
This has always seemed more likely to me. We don't respond to monkeys as if they were repulsive. We adore them. Monkeys are very cute.
I think maybe the issue with the uncanny valley is that if certain specific things are wrong, the simalucrum looks like it's an individual with a disease. Many computer animations of human faces look like people with some sort of brain damage. The animators try to push the puppets harder than pupptery will accept.
This is often because the animator is trying to push the entire illusion of lipsync and emotion through facial expressions. In life, people don't really move their lips all that much. A good animator knows to keep the body moving so that the face doesn't have to do all the acting. A bad animator works out the lipsync and sticks it on a relatively still model, then starts overdriving it when it isn't convincing.
Puppets can be startingly human without being repulsive to more than a small portion of the population. Granted, there are people with an irrational fear of marionettes, but there are people who are afraid of balloons too.
In the end, the issues involved are so subtle, I'm more ready to blame the artistry of Mori's robots for having been repulsive than accept the idea that models which are similar to humans, but not quite there, are *inherently* repusive.
Concluding that his research proves the existence of the uncanny valley is rather like looking at the response to Anime fanart and concluding that the more stylized a representation is, the more horrible it is. In point of fact, most fanartists just aren't very good. I think Mori's research just shows there weren't any good Robotic Face Designers yet.
Man, and I thought all I had to be afraid of was cyborgs with kiloblaster eyes and grenade launchers for hands...now I've got nightmares of creepy cyborg-zombie women with their boobs rotting off.
BLEEP-BOOP! c-Come here...zzzt....baby! Kiss meeee%@&*$!!
Fucking insane diabolical plastic surgeons.
ask if she runs Linux?
/dev/null i'll be in a chroot -u none jail!
well we could make pickup lines for our new, hot sex android overlord masters.. whom I for one welcome.
So, your mount point or mine?
When was the last time you had a 3 hour Fscking?
You're such a bad daemon, fork me you apache babe.
Can we be descrete about this transaction? i don't want a trace of it in the syslog -- if the wife finds out i've been cheating on her with the
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Imagine a Beowulf orgy of those. There, I said it!
AT&ROFLMAO
i want the soft gentile feel of fat in the bosom.
Me, I'll take the soft Jewish feel any day.
The dolls run from the overly stylized to the chillingly natural (another).
The FAQ is... uh... interesting . Example:
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these... An orgy?
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
I think there is a world market for maybe five sexbots. (Thomas Watson of IBM)
Where the ENIBOT is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, sexbots in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics)
Most sexbots will probably still occupy a large room, however, because of the space needed for the ancillary software - the tapes and cards to be fed in, the operating staff, and the huge piles of paper for printing out the results. (Prof Desmond King-Hele)
The Sexintosh uses an experimental device called a breast. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. (John Dvorak)
No one knows what to do with seven sexbots at one time. (PC Week Magazine)
Hello everybody out there using minsex - I'm doing a (free) sexbot system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) ATbot clones. (Linus Torvalds)
and of course...
640K ought to be enough for anybody. (Bill Gates)
http://www.sysprog.net/quothist.html
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
what if strip club workers were replaced by these robots? you would be in a room filled with guys getting hard looking at a machine.
So it wouldn't be much different than E3?
Japan is not isolationist. However, Japanese people are some of the most racist people you'll meet. Before you start turning on your flame throwers, please bear in mind I am Japanese. I grew up there for a while, moved to the US, and then spent 2.5 years there as an adult.
Having said all that, if you're white or Japanese, then you have nothing to fear from their racism. Heavens help you if you're any other ethnicity; the stereotype is that you're poor and you're probably going to end up as a criminal.
Fortunately, these views are changing, but it will take a long, long time before cultural outlook and stereotype change sufficiently.
I mean, sex bot is all well and good, but if she can also act as a ninja body guard with enough weapons to take out a hardened military target, well, where do I order?
I saw a mini-documentary on this robot last month on Discovery Planet (during their "Japan Week").
This robot is not self-sufficient. It's power supply (in the form of compressed air) is external to its body. The article mentioned this, but the comment ("powered by a nearby air compressor") was easy to miss.
I also found her movements to be a bit rough. It's been a while, so I don't remember exactly what I found wrong with them, but it might be related to her limited range of movement. They were talking about the need to increase (double??) the number of "motors" (or whatever you call what she uses).
They were examining her motion by having someone wear motion detectors on a person and having the robot mimic the person's movements. They probably had motio detectors on her too -- I don't remember -- to compare the difference.
"She" doesn't need to stand...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I say "half" as an estimation--we female types wouldn't succumb to such trickery.
Ha! Of course not, all it takes to control you female types is a shiny rock.
You don't get arrested for disposing of a robot in the dumpster.
You know, it's not like robots are so unique...
I was told by some head hunters when they were training for how to do sucessful job interviews that studies have shown that women who are very attractive are sometimes discriminated *against* by people. That is one of the reasons that they will tell people to dress well, but on the conservative side for job interviews.
Maybe it has to do with people not wanting to create the perception that they hired someone because they were attracted to them? Or, it could be that they are trying to repress their own feelings, or whatever.
Likewise, in some cases, if you had a beautiful female robot, some people would perhaps be repulsed because they would be trying to deny their feelings of attraction.
Finally, I bet there are some people out thier are repulsed by homosexuals as a way to repress their own feelings.
This doesn't imply that there should not be pretty women, homosexuals, or realistic robots. It just means that people have feelings for complicated reasons.
But, in any case, kids these days will hardly bat an eyelash at an android. It's really only people in certain psychographic groups that would be uncomfortable. Remember when you were afraid to turn on the computer for fear of breaking it? Well, there are still people like that in the world. But, there are a whole lot more people who aren't like that then ever before. And those people like the thought of a realistic robot.
Randy.Flood@RHCE2B.COM
Was wondering when this was going to appear on Slashdot.
When I first saw this on another site, I did a bit of surfing around and found the Kokoro-Dreams site that has a few pictures and (more importantly) videos of the ladies in action.
All but one of these is in WMV format and the other is a Real Media file. I would have Coral-Cached this whole site, but they've implemented some nasty referer checking and it won't work.
So instead, I Cached the individual video files for your enjoyment:
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/WMV/
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/WMV/
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/real
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/WMV/
There's also this Japanese PDF file (not many pictures):
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/ng/a
If you're interested in surfing around the original Japanese site, you can do so here:
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp/
Actually, I think it's a little simpler than that.
One of the most fundamental behaviours that evolution demands is successful reproduction. That's actually surprisingly complex thing to enforce in instinct: you don't need to just have a generic desire to fuck things, you need to pair that with a very strong ability to find the correct things to fuck. That means a whole lot of code to recognize members of the correct species and gender, and react very differently to them.
This produces strong and complex responses to entities that appear to straddle or blur these lines. This is why transgendered people, anthropomorphic animals, and homosexual sex produce such strong and mixed reactions in people: they tickle this deeply ingrained border between what is fuckable and what is not. (Please note that I'm not taking a moral stance on any of these, or trying to suggest that they represent "mistakes of evolution" or any such nonsense.)
Something that blurs the line between human and not (and particularly a human of your desired gender) seems as if it would obviously trigger this same response.