HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
GERALDO CASO/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
YOU. ROBOT
peers, he is a big fan of sciencefiction, and Bina-48 herself can
quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since 2009, he has made
great strides in design and robot
brainpower. His Einstein robot,
for example, moves its face with
motors and eye twitches and
strange human expressions.
“I have found in experiments, people become used
to the robots,” he says. “The
less startling they become, the
more commonplace they get. If
these robots do become commonplace then that uncanny
effect will go away.”
There’s also Henrik Scharfe,
a Danish professor who designed a shockingly lifelike robot clone of his face and body
calls it the Geminoid DK. Time
magazine named Scharfe one of
its 100 most influential people
in the world in 2011.
Scharfe has said that he
made Geminoid DK to explore
how we as humans “relate” to
robots, but that doesn’t keep
him from thinking much bigger.
In a video of a recent TedX talk
in Brussels his robot looked just
like its creator, but the glitches
in its speech were distracting.
At one point he had clearly set
up opportunities for the robot to humorously respond to
his questions in real-time, and
when it didn’t work, Scharfe
just paused for an achingly long
moment, and then continued.
He spoke of the future in
sweeping terms. “In 50 years,
a human being will be a human
being,” Scharfe said in Brussels, “but our technological surroundings will have changed
significantly.”
He goes into great detail
abo ut a dream he’d had where
he was sitting on a couch at
a party in a “hotel lobby or
somewhere like that,” and realizes he has suddenly become
an android. He sees the room
with his “android eyes” and
Danish
professor
Henrik
Scharfe
presents
his android,
GeminoidDK, at a
technology
expo in
Lima, Peru.