Erica, the 'most beautiful and intelligent' android, leads Japan's robot revolution
Erica, the 'most beautiful and intelligent' android,
leads Japan's robot revolution
Although the day when every household has its own robot
is some way off, the Japanese are demonstrating a formidable acceptance of
humanoids
By Justin McCurry in Osaka
Thursday 31 December 2015 03.48 EST Last modified on
Thursday 31 December 2015 10.04 EST
Erica enjoys the theatre and animated films, would like
to visit south-east Asia, and believes her ideal partner is a man with whom she
can chat easily.
She is less forthcoming, however, when asked her age.
“That’s a slightly rude question … I’d rather not say,” comes the answer. As
her embarrassed questioner shifts sideways and struggles to put the
conversation on a friendlier footing, Erica turns her head, her eyes following
his every move.
It is all rather disconcerting, but if Japan’s new
generation of intelligent robots are ever going to rival humans as conversation
partners, perhaps that is as it should be.
Erica, who, it turns out, is 23, is the most advanced
humanoid to have come out of a collaborative effort between Osaka and Kyoto
universities, and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute
International (ATR).
At its heart is the group’s leader, Hiroshi Ishiguro, a
professor at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, perhaps best
known for creating Geminoid HI-1, an android in his likeness, right down to his
trademark black leather jacket and a Beatles mop-top made with his own hair.
Erica, however, looks and sounds far more realistic than
Ishiguro’s silicone doppelganger, or his previous human-like robot, Geminoid F.
Though she is unable to walk independently, she possesses improved speech and
an ability to understand and respond to questions, her every utterance
accompanied by uncannily humanlike changes in her facial expression.
Erica, Ishiguro insists, is the “most beautiful and
intelligent” android in the world. “The principle of beauty is captured in the
average face, so I used images of 30 beautiful women, mixed up their features
and used the average for each to design the nose, eyes, and so on,” he says,
pacing up and down his office at ATR’s robotics laboratory. “That means she
should appeal to everyone.”
She is a more advanced version of Geminoid F, another
Ishiguro creation which this year appeared in Sayonara, director Koji Fukada’s
cinematic adaptation of a stage production of the same name.
The movie, set in rural Japan in the aftermath of a
nuclear disaster, made Geminoid F the world’s first humanoid film actor,
co-starring opposite Bryerly Long. While robots in films are almost as old as
cinema itself, Erica did not rely on human actors – think C-3PO – or the
motion-capture technology behind, for example, Sonny from I, Robot.
Although the day when every household has its own Erica
is some way off, the Japanese have demonstrated a formidable acceptance of
robots in their everyday lives over the past year.
From April, two branches of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial
Group started employing androids to deal with customer enquiries. Pepper, a
humanoid home robot, went on sale to individual consumers in June, with each
shipment selling out in under a minute.
This year also saw the return to Earth of Kirobo, a
companion robot, from a stay on the International Space Station, during which
it became the first robot to hold a conversation with a human in space.
And this summer, a hotel staffed almost entirely by
robots – including the receptionists, concierges and cloakroom staff – opened
at the Huis Ten Bosch theme park near Nagasaki, albeit with human colleagues on
hand to deal with any teething problems.
But increasing daily interaction with robots has also
thrown up ethical questions that have yet to be satisfactorily answered.
SoftBank, the company behind Pepper, saw fit to include a clause in its user
agreement stating that owners must not perform sexual acts or engage in “other
indecent behaviour” with the android.
Ishiguro believes warnings of a dystopian future in which
robots are exploited – or themselves become the abusers – are premature. “I
don’t think there’s an ethical problem,” he says. “First we have to accept that
robots are a part of our society and then develop a market for them. If we
don’t manage to do that, then there will be no point in having a conversation
about ethics.”
Nomura Research Institute offered a glimpse into the
future with a recent report in which it predicted that nearly half of all jobs
in Japan could be performed by robots by 2035.
“I think Nomura is on to something,” says Ishiguro. “The
Japanese population is expected to fall dramatically over the coming decades,
yet people will still expect to enjoy the same standard of living.” That, he
believes, is where robots can step in.
In Erica, he senses an opportunity to challenge the
common perception of robots as irrevocably alien. As a two-week experiment with
android shop assistants at an Osaka department store suggested, people may soon
come to trust them more than they do human beings.
“Robots are a mirror for better understanding ourselves,”
he says. “We see humanlike qualities in robots and start to think about the
true nature of the human heart, about desire, consciousness and intention.”
Coming face to face with Erica can be disconcerting. Her
ability to express a range of emotions via dozens of pneumatic actuators embedded
beneath her silicone skin – left this human momentarily lost for words when
invited by Ishiguro to strike up a conversation in her native Japanese.
For the time being, a flawless chat with Erica must
revolve around a certain number of subjects, yet experts believe that
free-flowing verbal exchanges could be only a few years away.
For that to happen, developers will have to imbue robots with
a more humanlike presence – what the Japanese call sonzaikan – rather than
settle for the human, but not quite, qualities that can put people on edge in
the presence of a moving, talking android.
By Ishiguro’s reckoning, the more they resemble humans –
from their physical appearance to their capacity for natural conversation – the
easier it will be for us to overcome our phobias, exploited to dramatic effect
by countless sci-fi movies.
“They will have to be able to guess a human’s intentions
and desires, then refer to an internal system in order to partly or wholly
match those intentions and desires in their response,” he says.
He pauses, before asking how that could alter the
dynamics of the robot-human relationship. It is a rhetorical question: “It
means,” he says, “that one day, humans and robots will be able to love each
other.”
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