uncanny valley

The Bells of Nagasaki

'Almighty God, Father of grace, we pray you, let your grace come down upon the men who will fly in this night. Guard and protect those of us who will venture forth into the darkness of your heaven. Lead them on your wings. Guard their bodies and their souls and lead them back to us. Give us all courage and strength for the hours that lie before us, and reward us according to the hardships they will bring. But above all, my Father, give your world peace. Let us go our way trusting in you and secure in the knowledge that you are near to us now and for all eternity. Amen.'

Taken from The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai, this is the prayer said by a US military chaplain to the crews of the Enola Gay and Bock's Car before they dropped the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. 

Irony, hypocrisy. Where to begin?

iCub Comes To Manchester

It's rare that advanced humanoid robots make it to Manchester, so when child-sized robot iCub was in town yesterday I made sure to get a place at the evening talk. And a fascinating session it was too, as project leader Professor Darwin Caldwell ran through the robot's development and capabilities. He revealed that they'd given it a cartoon-ish face to avoid the dreaded uncanny valley effect (though they'd forgotten to bring the face with them); that there are around 20 iCubs in existence; that his view is that the domestic robot will appear between 2020 and 2030 (nice tie in with Exilium then) and that European robotics has the edge on the Japanese in a few areas, such as mechanics and cognition. The robot is impressive and reminded me of another child robot, the CB2, developed in Osaka.

Professor Caldwell added that many technicians working on the Japanese robots don't actually know how the whole device works, just their part of it so it was interesting to discover that iCub is an open source project - anyone anywhere can contribute to it and if you've a spare £200K to build your own iCub, you can download the software into your home version and it will crawl around for you.

Everything iCub is here and there is video footage at the BBC news site.

The New Laws of Robotics

About five years ago, Japanese roboticists proposed the Atom project - a thirty-year plan to develop a learning humanoid robot with intelligence and sentience equivalent to that of a five-year old child (for background see this link). The proposal was compared in scale to the USA's Apollo project in the 1960s and it was envisioned that Atom would stimulate the economy and provide multiple spin-off developments in new technologies, just as the space programme had done.

At this stage, Atom remains just a proposal - although the Japanese government does fund many smaller-scale robot projects - but what if one day it does get approved? What do we want our robots to do? What do we want them to be? Much has happened since Isaac Asimov proposed his legendary three laws and as robotics constantly evolves, perhaps it's time to look anew at the issue of robot ethics. We need to look at what qualifies as intelligence, how we determine emotion and whether we want to give robots the ability to kill human beings, whether they will need protection from our worst excesses.

A discussion like this can't help but reference the work of Isaac Asimov (as well as Lyuben Dilov and Nikola Kesarovski), so with that in mind what guidelines are needed for the next generation of robots - and the humans that make them?

1: A robot should represent the best in human nature - exemplifying compassion, self-sacrifice and empathy through roles as carers, therapists, explorers, co-workers, companions, teachers or entertainers.

2: A robot must protect human and animal life.

3: A robot must protect its own life, unless laws one and two require otherwise.

4: A robot need not obey instructions given by a human being if such instructions conflict with laws one, two or three.

5: A robot must be committed to its designated tasks, unless this commitment conflicts with laws one, two or three.

6: A robot may not be subject to abuse or degradation by human beings.

7: Sentient robots and androids have the right to recognition and protection as individuals under national and international laws.

8: If a robot has human form, it must know it is a robot and declare its status when asked.

...Discuss.

Repliee R1

The Repliee R1 has made a rare appearance in the news, albeit with a couple of factual errors in this Daily Telegraph report. I'd be surprised if the Osaka University team are claiming it's the most realistic android created so far - that honour surely goes to their later androids such as the Repliee Q2 and some of the Actroids.

I met R1's creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, last year and he talked about how the robot was modelled in 2001 on his then five-year old daughter, describing how she was afraid of the R1 and wouldn't set foot in the lab. Things have moved on for the little girl and she now has an android dad, the Geminoid, which is a robotic copy of her father. I saw footage of her playing, very tentatively, with the Geminoid, slowly gaining confidence as she tugged at the robot in search of a reaction.

On Japan

Bullet trains and androids, geisha and sumo, J-pop and pachinko parlours. Subtle etiquette amid bold layers of architecture, cuteness now softens years of ritual and austerity.

It's a little like home, but with a twist. That makes me smile.

Japan is forever on the precipice – the earth could tremble at any moment. In 1945, the country slipped off the edge and it's as if the humility lingers. It is a polar opposite to the UK and USA - here there are manners, slenderness, a government that funds infrastructure not war. The divine is in the detail - Braille signs embedded into handrails on the subway. Bicycles left unlocked in parking racks. Technology that helps make life a little easier.

Same globe, different planet.

(originally published 1st Oct 2007)

Repliee Q2: A Curious Obsession

2002’s Machine Nation, described an encounter between Alex Sorber and the android Kim Fox, in a Boston robotics lab in the year 2027:

‘A kind of pregnant energy, like the calm before the storm, inhabited the space. They all said they could definitely feel a presence. And they’re right, he thought, there was a presence. Existing but not living. Being but not thinking. Completely still, frozen in space and time, a flower blossoming from a bed of junk metal. She was a vision to behold.’

Not for one moment did I imagine that in September 2007, I would have my own similar experience with the android Repliee Q2 at the University of Osaka’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory....

...The first time I saw her, I passed her by, a fleeting glance of a figure behind a curtained off area of a lab. As if she were no more unusual than a student at her desk. But something, stillness perhaps, marked her as being out of the ordinary.

Later, we had a more formal introduction – a chance for a few photographs and more careful study. Pale pink shirt, black pants, shoulder-length auburn hair. Her appearance quite demure. Silicone skin, detailed with eyebrows and lashes, her arms somewhat limp at her sides. The skin looks ‘right’ on her face, a little less so at her neck and fingers. She was blind and deaf when I met her – an array of out-of-body cameras, microphones and positional sensors were all turned off. But when motion came through electricity, computers and hydraulic pumps, she moved and spoke like any other person. There seemed nothing unusual about her at all.

Then, she was powered down and for a few minutes, we were left alone. Me and this presence. I stared at her, the way I would never stare at a flesh and blood person. I waited for her to move again, but she did nothing. Embodiment made her presence palpable, even though we did not touch. In this off-state, she has animation in potential only; but she is not dead. Instead, she is in a third state, life still present in the machines that power her, ready when the switch is flicked to bring her back into motion. Her maker, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, talks of the Japanese seeing the soul in all things, animate and inanimate. Perhaps then, this off-state is her sleep, tranquil moments of recuperation between periods of activity and sensation. Her dreams made on a quiet campus in 21st century Japan.

For now, Repliee is complete. She cannot yet walk, but she is a step on an evolutionary path. She and her kind will become the perfect expression of Japan as it aspires to be. Helpful and loyal, efficient and unthreatening. Technology that is warm and soft to the touch. As Japanese as Hello Kitty and the Osaka subway system. The future is here, and it wants to hold us and teach us and make our lives better.

(originally published 24th Sep 2007)

Lest We Forget

Sixty-two years ago this week, two weapons of mass destruction were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Atrocities slowly erased from the group memory of the Allied powers.

(originally published 9th Aug 2007)

Gaze Direction: Signs of Empathy?

Funny how the future turns out. Researchers developing androids at the University of Osaka have done experiments to see whether humans view their androids (Repliee Q1, R2 and the Geminoid) as mere objects or 'social presences' - i.e. in the same way that people see other people. One of the test parameters was to monitor eye movement, or gaze direction, in the human participants to learn what unconscious responses they had to the androids. It appears that even though the test participants knew they were in the presence of robotic devices, when the androids made regular minor 'natural' movements such as as blinking and breathing, people had exactly the same unconscious eye movement patterns when talking to the androids as they did when talking to humans.

Perhaps we subconsciously seek out anthropomorphic behaviour in the world around us, and if objects have human form and behaviours, then we can't help but respond to them the way we do each other. Is this perhaps an empathy test for humans?

(originally published 31st May 2007)