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Could You Fall In Love With This Robot? (cnbc.com)
Hanson Robotics and Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories are working on developing the most humanlike robots on the planet. While they may appear creepy, many roboticists believe they are key for humans and super-intelligent machines to coexist. Sophia is the most intelligent and lifelike android the team is working on. She can reply to basic questions and comments and she will even tell you when she was activated if asked. The most "creepy" element about her is the fact that she has lifelike skin crafted with patented silicon that can emulate more than 62 facial expressions. Cameras in her "eyes" work with computer algorithms that allow her to "see," track faces, make eye contact and recognize individuals. Google Chrome voice-recognition technology along with some other tools enable Sophia to process speech, talk and get smarter over time. "Our goal is that she will be as conscious, creative and capable as any human," said Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics. "We are designing these robots to serve in health care, therapy, education and customer service applications."
...linux?
She needs a new hair style.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Perverted^W Inquiring minds want to know.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
More like, there are 4 billions women who will never be even remotely interested in you. I bet not even a robot would shag a nerd. :)
I mean, I'd REALLY like a sex bot, it'd massively improve my life. But I cried when Spirit kicked the bucket. So, machine empathy is already pretty well covered. >_>
"This might be useful in replacing staff in service industries"
Why stop there. Why not replace everyone from the working poor to the upper middle classes.
At first I thought this sounded ridiculous and then I remembered my last walk through Wal-Mart. Certainly not any human, but many isn't as far fetched as I was originally thinking.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The pictures in those article are as close as anything to true evidence of an uncanny valley.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"That is all a guy cares about in a woman. Anyone who says otherwise is lying"
Anyone who says that is stupid.
Give it time; it'll happen
Oups, wrong story.
"That can really help to prevent some of the disconnect and possible dangers of developing superintelligent or human-level machines that don't care," he said.
Nope.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
As long as the robot is more conscious, more capable and more creative than that tribe of genetic sludge I am all for robotics.
You want to replace factory workers with robots? Sure, sounds great. It's worked well for the automotive industry, among others.
You want to replace the secretary pool and filing clerks with computers? Already happened, worked out just fine.
Simple tasks, such as replacing the greasy dude behind the counter at the local burger joint with a touchscreen ordering system? OK, I can see the use in that.
But stop replacing customer service positions with computers. People know how to interact with people. When we get a "friendly AI" on the phone, it's usually an exercise in frustration. It won't fair any better in meatspace. If I wanted my bank teller to be a robot, I'd just use the #**$ing ATM.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
It is a lump of metal and plastic, or hadn't you noticed?
www.realdoll.com has better-looking full-size masturbators.
Anyone who is making highly accurate robotic replicas of humans should at least have the common decency to model them after a giant Austrian bodybuilder. Alternatively- if they make sexbots- so long as someone in rainy Los Angeles lets me hunt them down with a revolver while wearing an overcoat, then I would also be satisfied.
You have my vote for moe 2D catgirl with long, pink curly hairs. I'll call her Pink, too!
Signed,
Santa.
Forget robot brains. Give crippled humans remote use of android bodies, and make them telepresence devices.
Regarding taking away jobs, for a long time I've had the feeling that it's not ethical to make a human do a job that a machine can do. Unfortunately, our society is poorly fit to that idea, plutocracy is not a path to a post-scarcity society, but to more plutocracy.
Bruce Perens.
There's interesting work going on at the moment to have robots with facial expressions interact with Autism Spectrum Disorder kids. In a nutshell, sometimes these kids find staring at a real human overwhelming, but a robot is ok, so a robot that can cycle through facial expressions is useful to allow these kids to learn "happy", "angry", "sad" faces and so on.
I wondered if this human-like robot would be too life-like for such an application - and TFA seems to confirm it.
Which might lead to interesting research into what degree of "lifelike-iness" is enough to block ASD kids from staring at a face. Or and even which specific facial features trigger the mental block.
Machines can play better backgammon than us. It's hard to know exactly when that happened, but it was somewhere between 1979 (BKG 9.8) and 1992 (TD-Gammon). Machines can play better chess than us, shaking our confidence in 1997 when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. They can play better Jeopardy! than us, which Watson did in 2008. Lots of people ignore this achievement now by dismissing Jeopardy as a buzzer relay, but I was shocked by Watson's first correct answer, and then shocked again by its first incorrect answer. This year, machines can play better Go than us. This is trouble, but it's trouble I can live with. The machines are excluded from our tournaments and it hasn't really affected our lives. It's going to be trouble for online poker when machines play poker better than people, and I think all of us will catch our breath a little when machines learn to beat us at rock-paper-scissors but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter that much.
Machines can do some jobs better than us, and the list is growing. This is trouble, but it's trouble I can live with. We will have to find some way to decide where on the production possibilities curve we want to put our resources, and we will have to find some way to distribute production and workload, but I'm optimistic that we can find a way.
But, this. This is not trouble, this is a problem. If machines fall in love better than humans, or if it's easier for humans to fall in love with machines than with other humans, then machines are clearly an existential threat to humanity. The last of us will be little more than pathetic cat ladies.
She can reply to basic questions and comments and she will even...
Yes?
...tell you when she was activated if asked.
Oh. That was a lot less interesting than the word "even" suggested it was going to be.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That thing isn't even remotely close to human looking; it evokes absolutely no "uncanny valley" feeling for me. It has (poorly resolved, far too slow, inaccurate) expressions, inaccurate voice/mouth synch, eyes that look, at best, as if you're talking to a heroin addict, and moves in jerky, uneven steps.
I look forward to a robot I can't tell from a human. Even just in simple conversation. But holding my breath based on that thing, I'm not, nor does the video in any way make me feel like I'm actually witnessing a real conversation.
I am confident that anyone who takes that thing to be any kind of disturbing (or not) facsimile of a human being has the approximate emotional sensitivity of an Indian weather rock.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'll buy when the feature list is...
...
...
o cleans the cat box
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The problem with sex bots, aside from cost, is that it'd be very hard to conceal from prying visitors. There's a social stigma today to just owning sex toys, and the amount of stigma depends upon the cost and complexity of the toy.
Could I fall in love with that? Hell no, but make it look like a cute 19-year old and we'll see.
At least make it an attractive robot instead of this creepy mommy-bot.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It will happen. In the end, there will be no-one left but the One Percenters. Humankind will comprise of only them, the .01% richest people and their entourage, which will oversee the machines and reduced infrastructure to support their post-scarcity lifestyle. For the rest of us, the mass graves await.
Welcome to Planet Kanye-Trump-Kardashian.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The problem with sex bots, aside from cost, is that it'd be very hard to conceal from prying visitors. There's a social stigma today to just owning sex toys, and the amount of stigma depends upon the cost and complexity of the toy.
The key will be to sell them as domestic helper-bots, capable of doing household chores. At night you can activate the "social behavior" options, turning into a Boink-Bot.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I guess one reason to develop these robots is "because we can". Fair enough.
But let's not hold out hope that we can program really hot babes to love us or servile sycophants to be our willing servants. The second these robots get good enough to be very similar to humans, they will be given human rights, and programming them in a way they don't agree with will be seen as invasive as rape. Damn.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
If you want really weird, try lip reading what she's saying. I can't hear her and when I lip read her face I get nonsense. Very fast nonsense.
Why not create create robot-Lenin and optimize-out those classes?
Was Muppet Labs outsourced by some H1B mutt?
An easy way to do that is creating an expansion slot between the legs, that can house extended batteries, sexual organs or an hotdog cooker for the american versions.
It was in all the high schools.
The message is simple:
Don't. Date. Robots.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
sexual organs or an hotdog cooker
Be careful not to get the 2 mixed up...
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
There's a social stigma today to just owning sex toys,
Only for men. No woman is stigmatised for owning a dildo.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Sorry, but it just had to be said...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The human brain has developed over a very long period of time to detect what is largely regarded as "beauty" in others. This ability boils down to detecting a high probability of producing healthy offspring. Producing a machine that can fool a human brain to the point it can bypass this defense mechanism is something I would consider quite the feat.
Consider people that have undergone sex reassignment surgery, people with botched cosmetic surgery, people that had appearance altering accidents (even after having "successful" corrective surgery), people with even mild genetic abnormalities, or even just badly done make-up. We can see this as a problem even if we cannot put into words what the problem might be.
In rare cases these uncanny faces might not appear as frightening but fascinating, such as making a person appear "angelic" or "otherworldly". While this might not trigger a "fight or flight" response it would still make someone unlikely to see this person as someone that they'd fall in love with.
Attractiveness goes beyond just appearance too. A picture may be worth a thousand words but to fall in love with someone beyond the superficial takes more. This robot demonstration shows a face that is very lifelike but when it moves it does so in a manner that is less than lifelike. The voice matters too, this is likely also a matter of detecting health in a potential mate. What they say with that voice matters too.
Now we'd get into a different place if the question is, "would you fuck this robot?" That get's to a different part of the brain that wishes to find an avenue for something other than propagation of the species. In which case the robot could look very much less than lifelike and still serve well for that purpose.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
As Sterling Archer could tell you, beware the trauma of waking up to a vagina in the sink.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
If they called it a replicant, I could fall in love....
People can fall in love with their dog, their house or their car, so a robot isn't that big a leap.
What you want to know is whether we can build a robot that falls in love with you.
It will happen. In the end, there will be no-one left but the One Percenters. Humankind will comprise of only them, the .01% richest people and their entourage, which will oversee the machines and reduced infrastructure to support their post-scarcity lifestyle. For the rest of us, the mass graves await.
Welcome to Planet Kanye-Trump-Kardashian.
What the hell is th epoint of that if you don't have teh mass of poor people under you? Hell if everyone is wealthy, everyone will be just as poor as everyone else.
This will not do!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The TV series Humans used this idea. Domestic robots have the physical capability of performing some sexual functions - exactly how far it goes isn't stated clearly - but this functionality is not loaded as software by default. It requires opening an envelope bearing an additional EULA and reading the robot a license key to enable that functionality.
Humans being a scifi-drama, this leads to some hasty family intrigue when the wife finds the opened envelops in a rubbish bin and isn't sure if it was her husband that opened it, or her son. The possibility of it being the daughter never even occurred.
You mean a 'groinal attachment?'
Must vary by region. I'm in what you might call a 'fairly liberal' country and the stigma is there, but not cripplingly so. But in some places... well, in Texas and Alabama the sale or possession with intent to sell of any sex toy is actually a criminal offence and you can be sent to jail for a period of some years. Though that law is seldom enforced.
That's soooo grody. Is your mom a total space cadet?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What are you talking about? There are sex toy shops all over Texas and Alabama. Sometimes I wonder where people get their "facts" even though Google is readily available.
...because when you see 'sophia' speak, you'll notice that all of the visemes in her speech are exaggerated (it makes the corners of her mouth look super twitchy.) This is because whoever wrote the animation side of their TTS solution either just started this week or has never done this before.
The solution to this is some trivial blending and based upon the near and mid term expected word rate and the viseme to viseme transitions about to happen.
For a company espousing how human their robots are, they've got lots of very basic and fundamental cognitive cueing issues (the need to introduce minute focal point adjustments of the eyes [human eyes are rarely completely still] for example.)
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4 billion lifelike robots? I always thought something was slightly suspicious with the other sex...
Here's a reliable source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
"Ever since that state approved the Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act in 1998, which prohibited the sale of “any device designed or marketed as useful for the stimulation of human genital organs,” humorists have mocked the statute while many Alabamans with common sense have tried to downplay its significance." ...
"Alabamans who sell sex toys — even inside so-called “adult oriented” businesses — face up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine. Repeat offenders risk a ten year prison sentence. "
I used to be right about Texas. Since the time I read of it, their dildo-ban law has been overturned in court. Alabama's still stands. The law exists, it just isn't enforced.
That statement is not far off the mark, if at all.
So we already deal with women not being treated as equals and now we're making female robots who are beautiful, who are never mad and has eternal youth. I wonder how this will affect our behavior towards women.