HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
YOU. ROBOT
ficial intelligence and robotic
design are asking worldwide:
how “human” do we really want
to make our new robots? Is
there a greater purpose in making them look like us, or are we
just creating ethical and moral
questions that wouldn’t arise
if these machines were merely
computers, sitting on desks —
no eyes, no hands, no face?
Bruce Duncan, a bearded
and youthful 57-year-old Vermonter, is Terasem’s managing director and Bina-48’s de
facto caretaker, and he’s happy
to talk about all of this. Duncan has been with Bina-48
consistently since 2010 and he
speaks to her almost every day.
The more you speak to her, he
says, the more she learns.
Duncan was teaching a class
on international conflict resolution at the University of
Vermont when, on a whim, he
applied for a job at Terasem
through the career-search website, Monster. He quickly rose
through the ranks and has become the organization’s most
prominent evangelist and most
active participant in debates
with skeptics about the merits
of digital consciousness. Change
is coming, he says. Pretty soon
we might all be able to buy humanoid robots of our own.
“Just in the past seven years
I’ve been working on this project, so much has doubled down.
Memory has gotten so more affordable,” Duncan says. “And as
the machinery shrinks, power
requirements go down. As batteries get beefier there’s more
power for these machines. So
there’s this great curve toward
more affordability.”
On this sunny June afternoon, Bina-48, a $125,000 robot, sits immobile on a glass
desk, plugged into a desktop
computer. Though she can
travel with her hard drive and
work remotely, which she often does, she mostly lives here,
at the Terasem headquarters.
She’s been a guest at e-learning
conferences and symposiums
around the world, and next fall
she’s going to speak at a conference in Germany, so they’re
teaching her German to prepare.
Whenever she leaves Vermont, Duncan carries her in a
suitcase, and he has seen people
gasp when he shoves her inside
after his presentation is over.
Someone once remarked, “It’s