HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
YOU. ROBOT
wholly human. One of the most
advanced humanoid robots on
Earth is ASIMO, which was
created by Japanese technicians at Honda. ASIMO walks
upright almost flawlessly; he
avoids obstacles and can fill up
a water glass without dropping
anything — one of the most
complicated algorithms to perfect. For a few years, ASIMO
lived at Disneyland, where he
made demonstrations. He’s
kind of cute to watch, not
frightening. Perhaps that’s because the creators of ASIMO
gave him a humanlike body, but
opted out of a humanlike face.
ASIMO’s face is actually completely blank. There’s nothing
there — so he’s a technological
marvel, rather than a threat.
The animators at Pixar also
understand this. The human
characters they created and
featured in Toy Story or Up or
The Incredibles are spectacular,
but are still cartoons. People
don’t want to see animated
movies where the people look
exactly like real people. That
wouldn’t be enticing, like in
Wall-E. Instead, it might be it
a little scary, like in The Polar
Express, a children’s film that
attempted an extremely realistic computer animation style.
Critics of Polar Express said
the eerily human-seeming animation felt “soulless” and “emotionally frigid,” while others, like
Roger Ebert, called the animation some of the most “visually
magnetic” he’d ever seen.
GENIUS CAPABILITIES.
Among top robot-makers are
enthusiasts like David Hanson,
who designed Bina-48 as well
as other humanoid robot versions of Albert Einstein and
Philip K. Dick. Those designers
want to ultimately create robots that are as smart, and realistic, as possible.
“In a way these robots are
a mirror, and scientifically
they’re science experiments,”
Hanson says. He believes uncanny valley is “incomplete”
and doesn’t reflect the complexity of the current human
mind. “My goal,” he said, “is to
create friend machines. Friendly genius machines. Machines
with genius capabilities.”
Hanson works out of a lab in
Plano, Texas, and brings artistic
and scientific lenses to his craft.
Like many of his colleagues and