Sdtrk: ‘Wear your love like heaven’ by Masonna

Remember when I wrote a number of months ago about how Hiroshi Ishiguro, the ‘father’ of Repliee, my favouritest Gynoid in the world, said he was going to make an Android duplicate of himself? You don’t? Tch. Well anyway, he’s gone and done it. Meet Geminoid HI-1:

Left, Geminoid; right, Ishiguro-san

Meet the Remote-Control Self
Wired.com | By Tim Hornyak
12:00 PM Jul, 20, 2006 KYOTO, Japan — Hiroshi Ishiguro is a busy man. Between his two jobs, countless meetings and presentations, his demanding schedule was eating up all his time. So he built an android version of himself to pick up the slack.

Ishiguro, a senior researcher at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories outside Kyoto, has created a machine in his own image — a robot that looks and moves exactly like him. It sits on a chair and gazes around the room in a very humanlike fashion, just like its creator. In fact, the robot is an exact duplicate.

Ishiguro’s silicone-and-steel doppelgänger was made from casts taken from his own body. Powered by pressurized air and small actuators, it runs on semiautonomous motion programs.

It blinks and fidgets in its seat, moving its foot up and down restlessly, its shoulders rising gently as though it were breathing. These micromovements are so convincing that it’s hard to believe this is a machine — it seems more like a man wearing a rubber mask. But a living, breathing man.

But “Geminoid HI-1,” as the robot is called, has another trick up its sleeve.

“Everyone, thank you so much for coming today,” it says in polite but languid Japanese at an ATR demo Thursday, its lips moving to the sound. The voice is Ishiguro’s, broadcast through a speaker inside his android double.

Geminoid can be operated remotely so the robot reproduces the voice, posture and lip movements of Ishiguro, who wears a motion-capture system. A mouseclick raises a hand or finger.

Ishiguro, whose job is teaching at Osaka University, an hour’s drive away, designed Geminoid so he could “robot in” to his classes and skip the commute. As he steps out from behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz, standing beside his robot self, the shift is disconcerting.

“The idea is tele-interaction,” says Ishiguro, who is also head of the university’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. “If I access the android through the internet, I do not need to go to ATR anymore.”
the rest of the article is here

So he’s just lazy? Is that what he’s actually saying??
Seriously, that’s pretty fab. When he first mentioned that, I was thinking it’d take years for his Doppelgänger to be built, but I guess not. Then again, it might’ve been a case where he’d made that statement knowing that work on Geminoid was already underway. In any event, rather impressive! Of course, now I’m going to have to hunt down any and all videos with him..

Might I add here that ‘Geminoid’ is a very tokusatsu-y sounding name. I think Geminoid fought against Dimensional warrior Spielban in one episode, although I may be wrong.

Rock the hell on, Ishiguro-san! (Further info available at Tim Hornyak’s Loving the Machine)

Technorati tags: Hiroshi Ishiguro, Android, Repliee, Actroid, Gynoid, Geminoid

Sdtrk: ‘Message from home’ by Broadcast

You get Two Bonus Anecdotes along with this post; one now, and one at the end.
A long long time ago, in a highschool far, far away, Monti and I would periodically work on a script for a science-fiction-flavoured action film entitled ‘Give me fifteen dollars’. Don’t ask me about the title now — there’s a long story behind it, and I’m trying to rein in my tangents, here. Anyway, one of the main characters was Blitz, a Gynoid that was a part-time assassin and a part-time office worker, played by Monti. Would it surprise you to learn that I came up with that character? In one scene, Blitz is with her two friends, and she’s reading a book, and laughing uproariously. They ask her what’s so funny, and she holds up the book, which is by Isaac Asimov, and she replies, ‘”The Three Laws of Robotics”?? What bullshit!!’

No sex please, robot, just clean the floor
Ed Habershon and Richard Woods
The Sunday Times, June 18, 2006

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now — before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.

“There are two levels of priority,” said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. “We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”
the complete article is here

An article like this is both encouraging and disheartening. The positive side I see is that technology is progressing along at a fair enough rate, where there’s actually a need to consider that genuine Synthetiks might well exist within the next couple of decades. Of course, you can always factor in that technological progress always seems to be accelerating — it took less time for humanity to get from automobile to Segway, than from wheel to automobile, for instance, so it might even be less than twenty odd years. The negative side would of course be this whole paranoia-driven jumping the gun mentality of ‘well, we’re gonna be dealing with semi-sentient lifeforms pretty soon, so we need to start keeping very strict tabs on them before they start a Robot Apocalypse’. Sure, if we can simulate a lifeform that can think like Organiks do, then obviously there’ll be a need to implement a sense of Right and Wrong in their operating systems. But the line ‘ensuring human control of robots’ kinda rings of slavery to me. There’s a vast and nebulous grey area that comes with this concept, and like I’d said, it’s ace that they’re giving this some thought right now, but I can only hope that the members of Euron and other similar AI ethics groups have their own morals and ethics in order, before saddling them onto brand-new lifeforms.
Didn’t veach once ask a cluster of questions related to this topic? Yes, yes he did. I still have to get round to finishing those..

The other tale: I had taken fencing for a semester back in 1990, which was one of the few classes I enjoyed, as I got a B+ out of it. One of my classmates was this bloke by the name of Brian. We never hung out at all outside of class, so it was a surprise to run into him again in a parking lot in Ferndale several years later. We chatted for a few minutes — about what, I can’t recall — but we touched upon the topic of career study fields. From completely out of the blue, he said, ‘I think you’d be good at something like building robots or Androids.’ Keep in mind, that startled/pleased me twice as much as normal, cos he didn’t know of my slavering lust for fascination with Synthetiks. But the very next sentence out of his mouth was, ‘Although I think you should probably take a few ethics classes beforehand.’
I laughed like a drain

Sdtrk: ‘Flashback’ by Ministry

I would say so, yes! Otherwise I wouldn’t be posting about it..
Last night, whilst grabbing the Interbutt by the lapels and shaking information concerning ‘My living Doll‘ out of it, I saw a home theatre forum where they had a thread about telly shows that people would love to see on DVD. One poster commented:

according to Julie Newmar Official website – Julie herself owns the rights to all 26 episodes of My Living Doll and apparently owns copies of each episode — here is a link to her website so you can read all about it — she is planning to release them onto dvd— http://www.julienewmar.com/links.html

How incredible would that be, I ask you? I already know the answer — pretty damned. I’ve recently obtained, through a secret website, copies of six of the 26 episodes of ‘My living Doll’ burned to a DVD, and the show’s definitely worth seeing. Apart from the fact that Julie Newmar plays a Gynoid — which would clearly be any Technosexual’s dream come true — the show’s so cheesy, it makes ‘Three’s company’ look like the Royal Shakespeare Company. But I love ‘Three’s company’, so your mileage may vary.
So now I have to get round to writing Ms Newmar. She’s sitting on gold, I tell you! GOLD!!

Also, a new Doll company challenger has appeared, fighting for dominance in the cut-throat world of Japanese Dutch-wife production: the Erie series of Dolls, by Cruyff.

EEEEE NO PEEKING, you MASHER

Cute? Yes, although that’s really all I can say about them — they possess a generic style of cute. As any iDollators worth their salt know, American Synthetiks manufacturers have the lock on making their lasses sexy, whereas the Japanese are focussing on cute. To me, the Erie Dolls have a look somewhere between UNISON’s Superdolls, and Orient Industry’s CandyGirls — visually they’re so similar, that you want to ask Cruyff (quite a name, by the way — sounds like a pastry) ‘so, what exactly makes your Dolls different?’ Apart from the one-piece assembly, and the relatively inexpensive price, that is.
I’m really hoping the next Japanese company that springs up takes a different aesthetic approach, and makes their lasses look less like another CandyGirl imitation, and more like, say, Chestnut co. Ltd’s late-lamented Rare-Borg..
Still and all, the Erie Dolls ain’t too shabby, and the more Synthetiks manufacturers out there, the better. But you knew that.

Also also, I’ve managed to get a bonafide DVD copy of Luis García Berlanga’s ‘Tamaño natural’, aka ‘Grandeur nature’, aka ‘Grandezza naturale’, aka ‘Life size’, aka ‘Love doll’, aka ‘The Doll’. Heh, now you see why it took so long to hunt down a copy. But it’s a pretty ace little fillum overall — almost tailor-made for iDollators. Astonishingly enough, it’s from the Seventies!

She was a biter. But he loved her regardless

The only drawback to the DVD is that it’s in Spanish with no subtitles whatsoever. C’est la vie. Or however you say that in Español.

Finally, on a more personal front, Marika, Sidore-chan and I might well be in front of a camera again sometime in the next month or so, for a documentary being shot by an English film crew. Details, as always, are forthcoming..

‘Shouting to hear the echoes’. Synthetiks? Really? No shit?

Technorati tags: Julie Newmar, Gynoid, iDollator, Technosexual

Posted in Media cavalcade, Other automata, RealDolls & other 'love dolls', Sidore, our ladies, and I, Synthetiks | 9 comments »