Seriously. It’s below the fold:
…
That, according to reports, is NOT a human. It is something else.
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or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Woah…I’m just tripping down that uncanny valley.
Sorry, not freaked out at all. Of course, I read a lot of Asimov when I was younger. I, for one, welcome our new R. Daneel Olivaws.
The right/left side symmetry of motion, both timing and range, seemed a bit unnatural.
Actually, this is kinda cool. He’s also very cute.
Mimicking human expression could be an important development in robotics, especially for applications such as security or search and rescue, where expressions that the unit makes could lead to the individuals the android interacts with being more willing to cooperate. I guess that’s the same factor that makes people think it is creepy. I think people actively resist identifying with something they have decided is not them, making androids an outgroup before our technology has even advanced far enough to make them a common reality.
It’s clearly not a human. For me, at least, it doesn’t even make it to the valley. But it is incredibly impressive and streets ahead of anything like that I’ve seen before. I hereby revise my prediction for the production of plausible head and shoulders simulacra downwards by 5 years.
I admit, I’m still not completely convinced it’s a robot. I’ve seen enough real humans do artificial-seeming movements like that in music videos and such that it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable that a real human couldn’t pull this off.
There’s another video at the IEEE site (http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/latest-geminoid-is-disturbingly-realistic) that has the camera pulled back a bit. I initially found that video more convincing because I thought it showed the thing was only a head and torso, until I realized that the legs were present, just covered by a plastic sheet, and the arms were covered by a draped jacket. It being a human could also explain the cuts at various points in this first video, and the short duration of the other video — it’s challenging for a human to maintain such artificial stillness for too long, so the cuts could be used to conceal that.
Also, I could be fooling myself, but it seems that the movements aren’t *quite* perfect — the eyeblinks aren’t quite the same depth, the head twitches don’t have quite the same range of motion every time. That’s more consistent with a real human than with a robot, unless the robot has been deliberately designed to be a little bit imperfect, which has to be even harder than making the invidual movements seem natural.
This seems to be being taken seriously enough by enough serious publications that I’m reluctant to claim it’s a hoax, but I’d still really like to see the same kind of video with some section of the robotic skeleton or circuitry or something exposed.
Hm, actually this video is much better in terms of artificiality. There’s something about the fixity of the gaze here that I think would be very hard for a real human to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snB24BHw1mw
I still wanna see his circuits tho.
Fooled me. I thought he was a mediocre actor.
#6, watch his cheeks just below his eyes. That part of his face is too still; conscious control over those muscles is highly unlikely, especially refraining from using them together with other muscles in an expression that is otherwise natural looking.
And yet I called the robot him. Frankly, I’m finding this to be on the upslope out of the uncanny valley. If he’d made a scary face or something, it would be creepy. But as someone above said, R. Daneel Olivaw. This looks like a happy, fun robot, one it would be hard not to react to like a person.
According to Asimov, the first one of these was assassinated.
How does it do on its Voight-Kampf Test?