Engineer Hiroshi Ishiguro -- director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Osaka University -- replicated himself as a robot in 2006: Geminoid HI-1 was his clone with silicone skin and a metal skeleton. He crowned it with his own hair after a close shave. He had already experimented with his 5-year-old daughter Risa, who, seeing herself duplicated with amazing realism, could not honor her name: she screamed in fright and fled. His entry into the art of replicating was in association with OrientIndustry, a manufacturer of top-quality sex dolls (some simulate girls). There he learned the plastic technique and then mechanized it.
Ishiguro's second twin was more advanced in gesture and speech. HI-2 wears black like his master and is more realistic than a Michelangelo sculpture: even the cuticles are visible. His gestures reflect melancholy, anger, skepticism and introspection with movements of the mouth, eyebrows, cheekbones, forehead, arms, hands and head. He is always seated and is not much more than a blinking remote-controlled puppet with a hidden ventriloquist: the words are transmitted to him synthesized and come out of a speaker under a vase. He made HI-2 younger than his older brother: the scientist had retouched his face in an operating room. “My former geminoid looked older than me,” he declared.
The Japanese roboticist is a pop-star who tours the world giving somewhat circus-like lectures. He introduces himself with his alter ego and acts as if they were two in one: “the robot is an extension of my body and we are mentally connected by the Internet”. If the invitation comes from a city that doesn't interest him, he dispatches the geminoid and teleoperates it. Otherwise, they both go on a trip. The body goes in a box in the hold and the head in her handbag. When going through X-rays, the airport police opens the bag in shock and sees two Gemini heads that look complicit at each other.
Ishiguro's dream is a geminoid of his teaching at the university and another one working in his laboratory: he would operate them with his Smartphone from the steaming waters of an onsen.
I ask for a phone appointment and the secretary Makiko tells me that on a certain date and time Ishiguro will listen to me driving down the road. The day arrives and he attends to me in his broken and rude English: he does not seem to travel but to arrange papers with a frenzy, judging by the noises. I ask him if he is joking when he says that humans and robots “are the same”. He explains to me seriously --in short sentences like dictums-- that he feels that his robots and him are the same person. He adds that the day will come when humans will fall in love with androids and they will be able to imitate falling in love: “our next step will be to represent emotion and desire”. Many Japanese already love anime characters and there are companies that sell them “marriage certificates” (It is the phenomenon of waifuism).
I expose to the interviewee the approach of the anthropologist Jennyfer Robertson, who investigated the relationship of the Japanese with robots and sees a link with the ancestral religion, animist Shintoism. In the Japanese imaginary, the idea that things contain a living entity would endure: in a mountain, a tree or a sword inhabit those "camis". It is not strange then that an object that looks a lot like us and talks, moves and looks into the eyes recognizing a human presence, is perceived as the support of a soul that offers company. She replies reluctantly --as if it were obvious-- that he agrees very much: "we believe that everything has a soul and robots in some way too." Where a Japanese sees an "ordinary" spirit, we are terrified by a ghost. "Robots are our friends," underlines the man raised with superheroes like Astroboy, while the West was marked by the destructive autonomy of HAL 9000 in 2001 Space Odyssey and Terminator.
Ishiguro explains the objective of his work and it puzzles me: “to discover if humans can manage to perceive a presence in front of an automaton, just as before another human; I study people through robots”. The word sonzai-kan --translatable as "presence"-- is similar to the Western idea of "aura" that suggested standing before God through a Byzantine icon.
To finish off the talk, the almost robotic deep voice confesses: “I dream of making a robot that is unrecognizable as such and totally autonomous; I want to change the world with technologies. This doesn't make me afraid; robots are part of humanity and serve to improve life. We need technology to be human: we are not monkeys... if we have a declining birth rate, why not make robots? Being programmed, they would not have free will and there would be no need to fear: “if you ask me in an ethical sense what is more dangerous, without a doubt it is humans”.
Ishiguro records results of interaction with robots. He has noticed lewd looks towards female robots and fear on the part of his students, who, spending hours in front of Risa's replica, felt that he was following them with his eyes: he should have put her against the wall. The extreme case was a young man who at night, thinking that no one was seeing him, spoke to the girl and played music for her on a flute. His hypothesis is that people would have an instinctive tendency to project our humanity onto robots. His most radical experiment was Telenoid, a ghostly white baby that is pure torso and head --without legs or hands-- with near-human facial hyperrealism. He tested it on elderly people with a high level of autism and depression: several began to caress him, talk to him and laugh like a child.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCyy7MCESMAThe last and most perfect creation of the genius with hexagonal glasses was Erica, a beautiful and petite Japanese woman with bangs and propaganda hair, a receptionist turned newscaster and movie actress. She emits graceful geisha modes, simulates breathing, and is more intelligent than her predecessors: she has autonomous functions that do not require teleoperation. She does slave labor without complaint on an online TV channel and according to Ishiguro, this nymph frozen in the flower of her 23 years is an Androidol U. The experiment involves determining if a robot can become a Japanese idol admired by millions.
The eccentric Ishiguro declared that robots will soon be as good sexual partners as English teachers. The mechanized Adonis and Venus sculpted by pupils of Ishiguro will run ahead of the flesh and blood. Steven Spielberg's masterful robot gigolo in Artificial Intelligence foreshadowed that industry. To promote cyborg evolution, this oriental daffodil that admires his silicone reflection goes around the world scattering replicating dreams, obsessed with giving personality to his creations. No one knows how far he will go, but it is very difficult for his life to reach his goal of passing the Turing test: to confuse an automaton with a human. Computers still do not prophesy the future, but that day already has its fixed date.
Julián Varsavsky is the author of the book Japan from a capsule: robotics, virtuality and sexuality (Adriana Hidalgo Editora).