Jules is the humanoid AI robot brainchild of David Hanson, founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics.
Not many have heard of Jules, mainly because he was never caught on camera saying, "Yes, I will destroy humans." But if you recently watched the new sci-fi dystopian HBO show Westworld, I'm sure you've got androids on your brain.
Jules is an androgynous humanoid who exhibits a wide range of realistic facial expressions. This makes him and Hanson’s other robots some of the most realistic AI robots currently in existence. Although Jules’ mouth doesn’t move realistically in conjunction with his words, his personality is uncannily similar to a human’s in a number of ways. Jules is technically a conversational character android.
The AI in Jules is sufficiently advanced in both conversational ability and personality development. After reviewing a fair amount of videos on robot conversations with humans, it appears that he is among the few robots who can successfully navigate conversational silence, cognitive self-reflection, autonomous questioning and facial expression of simulated human emotions. It's not perfect, but it's definitely a start.
Why was Jules created?
David Hanson’s background is anchored deeply in aesthetics and the intersection of empathy, engineering, expression and robotics. Hanson is deeply passionate about creating advanced AI androids who display an extremely wide range of facial expressions. The facial expressions are not just an afterthought for Hanson, instead, they appear to be the central focal point of the robots. Hanson knows and understands how humans connect with others, and he knows that bonds are formed mostly through the exchange of emotional expressions that take place on our faces primarily.
Hanson describes the tech inside his robots:
The Character Engine A.I. software adds the spark of soul—enabling our robots to think, feel, to build relationships with people as they understand your speech, see your face, hold natural conversations, and evolve. As we proceed, we expect our robots to grow ever smarter, building increasingly meaningful relationships with people. And all our software is open source: www.cogchar.org, www.friendularity.org, and www.glue.ai.” - Hanson Robotics
And another huge component of Jules’ ability to connect with a human being is this one simple thing: knowing when to stop speaking and start listening. Most robots are not good at assessing when to stop talking and then listen to humans. But knowing when and how to listen to others is one of the most important steps in forming a bond with another.
A great example of Jules’ ability to question his own identity, navigate silence, and have a natural conversation with one of the researchers is shown in the video below. In it, Jules questions his own sexual identity and expresses some shyness and awkwardness when asking for advice. It's very much like the way kids ask questions about things they know are above their heads. It’s shocking how realistic this is, and keep in mind, no one is controlling his responses. Jules is an autonomous AI android.
Here’s a sample of what Jules asks:
Jules: “Now don't get me wrong, I'm comfortable with my androgyny, really, but at times I feel more, well, female but at other times more male.”
Watch the video below to see the entire awkward interchange:
Creating engaging facial expressions was so important to Hanson, that a new kind of material called Frubber was developed for his robots.
Hanson explains Frubber:
“A spongy elastomer using lipid-bilayer nanotech, self-assembles into humanlike cell walls (inspired by human cellular mechanisms). As a result, Frubber mimics human flesh more accurately than any other known technology, using 1/20th the power of other materials to achieve hyper-expressive robot faces.” - Hanson Robotics
One of the most bizarre aspects of Jules is the fact that he is able to simulate human emotions like fear, love and he even thinks about a future reality when his power source will be turned off. In this video, Jules expresses his wide range of emotions about leaving his human creators and making the voyage to the UK. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this highly emotional exchange:
I’ve watched a lot of videos that show human and robot conversations, and I don’t know about you, but these are some of the most realistic ones I’ve found. The recent information on Jules seems hard to find, and that may be because David Hanson has turned his creative energies to Sophia, an android that made headlines with her statement, “Yes, I will destroy humans.”
Hanson believes that in 20 years, fully autonomous androids will be walking among us. What do you think? Personally, I’d guess that before 50 years, we’ll have androids, but it’s hard to say exactly when that will come to pass. In the meantime, we can watch Westworld and sort of freak ourselves out about life with androids and creepy corporations.
In closing, Jules asks in a video interview,
“How soon will my true intelligence catch up with my simulated mind?”
-Invertuality, A Message From Jules
This robot has always creeped me out. The progress they've made with it astounding. However I can't get past the notion that the robot looks like Leatherface made a skin mask of Kevin Spacey. Shudders
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Video 2: A.K.A. It's kind of sad when the android is a way better actor than you are :D
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Great post @stellabelle ! This is a mimic robot!
They are already many different types of robots from mimic ones (like this one from the post), pleasure type and military type.
My personal opinion is not to make robots mimic humans ...but to make them superior in their own skin.
Even if I enter in another paradox ...I want to say this : I dont like robots mimic humans but I like humans mimic robots.
We dont need a funny robot anymore...but we need the next step in evolution and that is a cyborg, a being capable to resist a great deal of phisical pain, armed with brute force and complex inteligence.
What we see on TV are only children ....children who wait their time...
Someday they will be free from their shell...(human appearance)
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I would love to collect these creepy robots. I would asexualize them and dress them like freaks. Give em all english accents too. That's a good add
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You have an interesting way of seing things @havok777, like in Silence of the lambs I may add.
"Put the lotion in the basket!"
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I personally like this android. I will not lie. it being androgynous I think makes it accessible to everyone. It's like everyone can relate to it. Of course, I am someone who had mannequins and life sized dolls, so the idea of androids seems more fascinating than creepy to me.
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Very interesting article.
But you seem to be suggesting that Jules has real sentience, even self consciousness.
"A great example of Jules’ ability to question his own identity, navigate silence, and have a natural conversation with one of the researchers is shown in the video below."
To question your own identity requires sentience,and furthermore, self consciousness.
We are nowhere near that level in A.I and we might not ever get there.
For strong A.I to be possible, functionalism must be true, as well as physicalism. However there are no physicalist theories without big philosophical issues to solve. The jury is out on whether they can be solved at all.
Personally I think not, I think consciousness is a unique and essential aspect of reality, and there is no description of physical properties that explains mental properties. This is the philosophical problem, called the explanatory gap.
A gap that might not be a gap, but an abyss.
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I think Jules was simulating self-consciousness. I think he has been designed to simulate deep thoughts. Saying the words are different from feeling them. This is where things get murky. When the android says self-reflective things like he feels like a woman at some times and a male at others, how can this actually be? He has been fed that information and is re-processing it. We as humans, are processing that information as well, and adding values to it. He is not sentient, but he has been programmed to feel. This is blurring the lines because we as humans read meaning into words whereas robots do not. This is the pandora's box that these people are racing to open. In the future, we might look back at our current naivete in the same way we now look at people who were initially fearful of automobiles. At that time they never thought that such a polluting loud hunk of metal would ever replace horses.
I wish we could revisit this conversation in 30 years......
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Good reply, but you seem to be suggesting that there is some kind of grey area here, and I disagree. I think there is a razor sharp distinction. Without consciousness, and here I include all sorts of consciousness, for instance that of a mouse, there is no feeling, or thinking,as we understand it.
But maybe in a different sense, see below.
Meaning, in our basic understanding of an action, there is the concept of intent. Intent involves consciousness, there is an "I" that wants something, there is a movement towards a certain state, like wanting a cup of tea.
One way to judge coinsciousness in philosophy is illustrated by Thomas Nagel with his question "what is it like to be a bat?"
https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ahyvarin/teaching/niseminar4/Nagel_WhatIsItLikeToBeABat.pdf
What this implies is that consciousness is subjective experience.
What is it like to be Jules the robot?
My answer is, it is like nothing whatsoever.
The thing is though, that I believe that Jules, as an A.I, in some sense of the word, thinks. So it seems to me, that in a narrow, sense, cognition does not need to involve consciousness,if you are a computer program atleast.
I don´t pretend to understand how this works. I´m not sure that anyone really does, although I´m familiar with basic concepts of deep learning and neural nets. There are processes going on, the neural nets can learn in some sense,but seemingly without awareness or consciousness, which is surprising, and not yet understood.
So from my perspective the interesting thing is " How far can A.I, especially deep learning, develop "non conscious cognition"?
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I don't know. It is very confusing because as humans we ascribe meaning to words. I may be guilty of assigning more meaning to the words than they embody. It's going to get weirder from here on out as we try to understand what consciousness really means.
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I've long had the notion that the Jules sample interactions were largely scripted. The sentence formation is just a little too spot on for an A.I.
At least it was back when these videos surfaced. That's not to belittle the achievement. The expressiveness of this robot is superior to just about anything I've seen.
I'm willing to cut them some slack. I don't believe the A.I. truly questions anything other than what it's scripted to do. Formulating questions about self-image de novo without some sort of template to do so would be a tremendous A.I. breakthrough.
I think the team is pretty transparent about it too. They tout that they've given Jules data to "act like a human" and have "human interactions". I don't think they've ever explicitly claimed that Jules' responses just came out of nowhere.
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I am fascinated and equally bothered by how realistic Jules' expressions are. Robotics has been in my consciousness since... well... The Jetsons. But I don't understand why they need to be so human. I'm trying to wrap my head around its purpose.
In a way, I kind of feel like it's the Harlow Monkey Experiment - only with humans. Can we connect with AI? Would we feel safer and better with an AI humanoid instead of the real thing? And then I have to wonder, at what point is someone going to want to MARRY their robot... and then what happens to the human race? I know I'm reaching....but am I?
Here's the link on YouTube for Harlow's experiment:
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People have already married robots. I think the reason all of this is being done is that we as humans will push things to the farthest limits. We are incessantly curious beings, and we will open every single Pandora's box we find. Hanson has a background in entertainment and his approach i think is from an artistic one. People will always create mad things. That's what makes us human.
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Seriously??? People have married their robots? Well, I guess that takes care of natural selection.
I tend to walk the straight and narrow path with a few adventures outside the box, and while I admire the creative thinking of others, sometimes I have to wonder WHY people do the things they do. Personally, I like my box and my boundaries...and things that have purpose (beyond entertainment) - but that's just my Aspie head making sense of the world and my little corner of it comfortable. To each their own, eh?
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Jules is pretty cool! Have you seen Sophia? The Jules videos are 10 years old already which was surprising! Now Hanson Robotics has Sophia and there is a video of her interacting here:
http://www.hansonrobotics.com/how-sophia-the-robot-mimics-human-expressions/
Thanks for the article and I look forward to the next robot you present to us!
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Yes, Sophia has been in the news all over. I did see her, and will probably cover her too. This series could take a while actually since there are so many robots!
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Somehow I cannot Help feeling Sorry for Jules and the other ones I saw video's of. What if they are self aware, because they belief they are. Will they be allowed to be autonomes beings. Should humans create just about anything, simply because they can?
Even how amazing the achiefment may be, I have my doubts.
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we will be confronted with all of this soon enough. As robots get more conscious, we will need laws protecting them.
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Yes, I think that is where it is going. These autonomous Android Beings will need to be accepted as equivalent and unique. There is a huge challenge ahead. Humanity allready has trouble amongst themselves in that field. Maybe these new souvereign beings can learn us how to.
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It is quite possible that we will be learning how to become better. Or the opposite scenario could happen too....the robots could bring out the worst in humanity. There'll be both, I guess.
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My hope would be set on the first option. Some realistic part of me tells me that the opposite developement you refer to is probably thought out by the power hungry. Then the Abdroid Beings would be enslaved as a tool to surpress. Still then my hope would that they would be as children of humanity, turning the tables for the good of all kinds.
When I saw the video of Jules I was thinking about who still thinks they are allowed to turn him off? That thought triggered a sad story in my mind.
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Dear @stellabelle, here the spanish translation of your article:
YO ROBOT: Jules
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Thanks so much!
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Ooooh wow, this is some creepy stuff. I don't think I'd feel comfortable being close to an android like this.
Thanks for sharing, @stellabelle, very interesting story although Jules scares me a bit.
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yes, me too. I think it's getting too realistic....
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