Take Erica for instance. The semi-autonomous android, and the product of JST Erato, the most funded scientific project in Japan. Erica was already 23 in 2015, the year in which she was created. She still had the same age when it was announced earlier this year that she would become a news anchor on local television. And different from her human colleagues she will still look exactly the same when most of us are dead and gone. She's can run conversations of ten minutes per session, while she can also recognize voices and faces, and minuscule motors also allow her own face to have all kinds of expressions. According to her creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, there's no doubt that she's 'the most beautiful and most humanlike android in the world'.

The 54-year old and somehow enigmatic Japanse robotics wizard leads the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University, and is the world's most famous maker of humanlike robots. As a child, growing up on the countryside near Kyoto, he was already a passionate painter, „because I was so interested in the human soul and wanted to represent it“. Once a student the same drive made him decide to dedicate his life to programming.In 2000 he created his first robot as a professor at Kyoto university. Two years later he presented his first humanoid, a look-alike of his five years old daughter Risa. Repliee R1, as the robot was called, got a mixed reception. Its capacities were still very limited, its movements clumsy, and even Risa didn't like him at all. But Ishiguro isn't the kind of man who gives up so easily. Since Risa he has designed some thirty more robots, mostly females. One of them, Geminoid F, became an actress in a traveling theatre play, and in 2015 she figured as the companion of a dying woman in the movie ‘Sayonara’.

But what made Ishiguro really famous were the robotic copies he made of himself,Since 2006, he has created five doubles, each time more advanced and more resembling, also because Ishiguro -with a typical Japanese sense of perfection- had some plastic surgery done to keep the resemblance with his artificial brothers while he was ageing. Their skin, complete with pores, is made from silicone, but their wigs were made from his own hair, colored in what looks like an artificial black. And the Geminoid HI-1 and his successors (named after gemini, Latin for twin) all wear exactly the same black clothes that have become his standard outfit. For Ishiguro, who looks like a Japanese version of Lou Reed in his later years- has some sense for showbizz and branding.

„I wanted to experience the sensation of looking in the eyes of my own image,„ Ishiguro explains his urge to create his own double, while referring to that typical Japanese notion of ‘sonzai-kan’, which means as much as 'human presence“.„I want to understand what it is to be human, catch my own 'presence', and find out who has my identity: me or the robot?“. Ishiguro is a pioneer in a relatively new crossover discipline: human robot interaction: the study of the relationship between man and machine, at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and social sciences. Questions that stand central to this field are the causes that make men trust a robot, or develop feelings towards it. And in a society in which the lives of humans and robots get more and more intertwined, Ishiguro also aims to develop robots that are more and more equipped with human capacities. „Don't get me wrong: I care more about people than robots, „ says Ishiguro, „.Yet robots are the best way for me to study human behavior“. Ishiguro and his team try to find out what behavior and body language have a beneficial effect on people, what creates trust, or might enhance distance. „For human behavior is extremely complicated. Even a very subtle and almost invisible eye movement can make all the difference. When we equipped a robot with eye movement, it became immediately much more human“.

One could also question, despite their ability to tell jokes, the capability of robots to develop a sense of humor, irony, and relativity, And what would the future be without these qualities? But Ishiguro, who loves to provoke, and has the media on his side, doesn't agree . Both he and Glas regard themselves as artists more than scientists, and the Erica project as a philosophical one as much as technological one. „For years now, I've been studying the reactions of humans on new technology, and I can tell you: everybody loves to have a conversation with a robot,“ says Ishiguro, „A robot who looks like a zombie, that's creepy, But not our humanoids. Our main concern is to redefine what it means to be human. And only when robots are designed to the image of man, will we also learn how to interact with them“.

„What does it mean to think?“ Glas continues, „What is human creativity? What does it mean to have a personality? What is a minimal definition of humans. What are the patterns that underlie human interaction? Only when we can answer these questions, will we also be able to implement them on robots. A next challenge is also to get the robots out there, into the real world, and get them interact with us, so that we can also explore what we really want from them. Maybe a robot is not a machine, or a thing. Maybe we will find out that it is new ontological category, for which we don't have the right words to describe yet“.

(fa/mb)

http://www.geminoid.jp