Professor Rodney Brooks described a metric that might be used to determine when a robot can be considered alive. He said that a robot might be considered alive if his students felt bad about turning it off. By that criteria, scientists from Japan’s Osaka University are on the brink of making an artificial life form.
The university announced in June the development of an anthropomorphic robot named CB2 designed to mimic the appearance and behavior of a toddler. Since then, videos of the robot have evoked a tidal wave of emotional responses. The robot has been called terrifying (September Popular Mechanics, Daniel H. Wilson, p21), creepy, and disturbing to list just a few. The inventors have even been compared to pedophiles. It seems that they’ve hit a nerve. So far, there haven’t been debates regarding the ethics of throwing CB2 to the ground or locking him in a closet. I’m sure that’s next.
From a technical perspective, it’s an impressive system. CB2’s actuators are soft pneumatics as opposed to rigid motors and gears. This gives CB2 smooth and uncertain but natural-looking movement. He has cameras in his eyes, and according to Daniel H. Wilson’s article Bouncing Baby Bot in this month’s issue of Popular Mechanics, CB2 can imitate facial expressions. He’s got microphones for ears, a vocal cord, and 197 tactile sensors. The designers did a good job of fusing all of this technology together into a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts anthropomorphic form that brings out something primal in the people who observe CB2.
In a Reuters video report by Dan Sloan, CB2’s designers have no problem thinking big by explaining that CB2 and his siblings are not designed to replace humans but are instead designed to become “new partners in human society.”
