Two big developments took place in the world of robots last week. The improvements are big, but one of the robots is big and the other is small.
The big one is the world's most realistic humanoid robot. This robot, standing with its eyes closed like a lifeless mannequin in a laboratory, first moves its shoulder. Then the camera suddenly wakes up when someone snaps a finger from behind. After looking around for a short time with confused eyes, he begins to examine his own body. The expressions on his face are much more realistic than any other humanoid robot we've seen so far. At the end of this bewilderment choreography, he finally notices us who woke him up… and is he startled or startled? I think he's trying to figure out what's going on and finally he reaches out and smiles at us.
How did you feel when you watched these images? Were you as surprised as him? Are you scared? Are you startled? Or scared? However, if I showed you these robots that assemble cars, would you still feel the same emotions?
Basically, there is almost no difference between these two robots. One is industrial robot, the other is humanoid robot. They both have engines connected by a lot of wires, and they change things in the outside world with the parts these engines move. Their cars in one, the shape of our faces in the other.
Naturally, when we see human-like things, we are much more affected by it. That's why we see an increase in the number of robots in this category, especially in recent years.
The people who made this robot called Ameca, which I just showed you, say that they produced it for the same reason: They say, "The reason we make a robot that looks like a human is to interact with people." “The human face is a very high-bandwidth communication tool.”
No matter how much we tried to be humanoid (human-like) in other experiments made so far, we were stuck in the middle when we looked at them, since they could not look exactly like them somehow. I have said that this is called the “uncanny valley” effect and I have explained this concept in detail in my previous videos.
Let me try to explain once again what I mean with new examples. In fact, let's use the previous experiments of "Engineered Arts" engineers who made Ameca, because we can see this effect very easily in those examples. Take a look at Cleo, which they introduced in January, for example. They dressed like a maestro. He makes graceful movements to classical music. At first glance, you think it's human, but after a few seconds, you realize that it's not human and startled. Because this image evokes that “uncanny valley” effect in you. Seeing such humanoid objects imperfectly resembling real people causes us to feel uncanny or strangely frightened and then disgusted. However, if we remove the same object from his clothes and skin, this effect will decrease. It will not completely disappear, but it will still decrease.
That's why when we build the next model of this robot, we're seeing a skeleton directly in Ameca to reduce the risk of the uncanny valley hypothesis evoking the cold and eerie feelings in viewers of an almost human-like being. So this time something different was tried. It is not hidden that he is a robot.
They also tried to reduce the different kinds of anxieties of the modern world. For example, his skin color is gray. Not Native American. Nor are they of the white race “born with privileges” or the yellow, brown or black races. Those who made it tried to make her gender obscure as well as her race. They wanted him to look neither male nor female. They focused only on basic human characteristics, facial expressions. That's why they painted his face gray.
Still, you may be thinking that they couldn't reduce their fear. Although they are touted as the most realistic looking humanoid robot in the world, we can say that such robots are a complex puppet or a mannequin in terms of technological development. No need to exaggerate. They usually produce such robots for show and entertainment purposes. He doesn't have other body features like walking or running yet.
You know, there is another popular robot manufacturer that has made up for these shortcomings: Boston Dynamics. When it comes to humanoid body movements, there is nothing more developed than these. They learned to perform all kinds of athletic movements with near-perfect balance and dexterity. Imagine combining the body of this robot called Atlas, which makes all these movements, with the face of Ameca. He moves like this and shapes his face from shape to shape. If we married these two robots… What would their children look like?
You think, "Well, robots can't reproduce..." right? They have now begun to breed. Look, now I'm going to show you a completely different type of robot. You will not be afraid when you see them. Because they don't look like us like humanoid robots. Nor are they as powerful and imposing as industrial robots that build automobiles. Tiny little ones… These robots, called Xenobots, are tiny biological machines 1 millimeter wide.
They look more like frogs than humans. They're already made with skin and heart cells extracted from stem cells from African clawed frog embryos. While skin cells form their basic structure; heart cells make it act like little motors. It shrinks and expands in volume to propel Xenobot forward. All of this is automatically designed with computer simulations to perform a specific task using a trial and error process (an evolutionary algorithm). These tiny robots are built to walk, swim, push pellets, carry small loads. They can work in groups, survive weeks without food, and heal themselves after injuries.
Now you will say that these are not robots, they are living organisms you know. Josh Bongard, professor of computer and robotics, says, "Most people think of robots as being made of metal and ceramic, but it's not what a robot is made of, but what it does, whether it acts on behalf of humans on its own."
So this is both a robot and an organism made from non-genetically modified frog cells. A combination of molecular biology and artificial intelligence.
That same professor recently announced that they had discovered that xenobots, which were originally spherical and made up of about 3,000 cells, could reproduce. But this has happened rarely and only under certain circumstances. This is called "kinetic replication": a process known to occur at the molecular level but never before observed at the scale of whole cells or organisms. With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of duplication. So what did he find? Pac-man shape! Yep, the supercomputer they used came up with a C-shape similar to the one in the 1980s video game Pac-Man. They discovered that he could find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, collect hundreds of them in his mouth, and after a few days the bundle of cells turned into new xenobots.
The interesting thing here is the programming that is done. The artificial intelligence they use did not program these tiny machines the way we think. He made a design based on his shape. Professor Bongard says: “Shape is essentially a program. Shape influences how xenobots behave to power this incredibly puzzling process.”
These microbots are still a very new technology. We can compare it to the computer of the middle of the last century. It has no concrete and practical application yet. Where can it be used in the future? It can take part in both the human body and the body of our planet. It can collect microplastic waste in the oceans. It can clean up radioactive waste. It can carry a drug in the human body. It can remove plaque that clogs the arteries.
As you can see, there are many types of robots. We have been using the tools made by some of them almost every day for years. When we see some of them, we are startled and startled, knowing that we are actually looking at the movements of 32 servo motors. We watch some of them dance, laugh and have fun. Of all these types of robots, it's what we can't see exactly that scares me the most personally. Biotechnological micro-robots and even nano-robots that have begun to self-replicate.
People are afraid of what they don't see, don't they? This is exactly what scares me. What will happen when robots that are too small to see are combined with what we can see? And how deep into an uncanny valley will what comes out lead us?
