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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."
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
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.
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?
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
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"...:-)
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
i want the soft gentile feel of fat in the bosom.
Me, I'll take the soft Jewish feel any day.
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.