‘You, Robot’: personal robots for the masses
July 20, 2012
Bina48 android (credit: Terasem)
What would it be like if you could transfer your personal data, your consciousness, to a robot or a machine?”
That’s what almost every major technology organization seems to be asking, says Huffington Post blogger Lucas Kavner.
Examples:
- Terasem’s LifeNaut project allows you to create a mindfile for yourself, or anybody else close to you, using photos and online data and other “digital reflections” you deem worthy of collecting and uploading. In the future, you could in theory transfer that mindfile into a machine, and then you’ll have a digital replica of yourself. Talk to it, teach it your expressions and personal history, give it personality tests.
- Terasem has teamed up with Hanson Robotics to create the Bina-48 conversational humanoid robot, which includes excerpts from 20 hours of interviews with its inspiration, Bina Rothblatt.
- Google Now, an Android-phone version of Apple’s Siri, uses your past Google searches to gauge your habits, your interests, and how you go about your day.
- Microsoft Research Lifebrowser can take your photos, emails, search history, documents and events on your personal calendar and then infer “memory landmarks” about your life organize them into a timeline.
Comments (40)
by Cybernettr
I think they made the complexion too dark for that robot for someone with blonde hair. It reminds me of that obsessive-compulsive woman who was addicted to tanning salons! Gross.
by Michael
What’s up with the siri plug? If google now is simply an android version of siri like you say it is why not use siri as the example? otherwise if it’s not then why does siri deserve a mention?
by Dennis R.
I don’t think I’d want to replicate myself as I am now. I’d like to improve me. To be honest, an avatar that looks and thinks like me wouldn’t be much of an improvement.
I can kind of understand Ray’s desire to recreate his father. Kind of like historic preservation that he can converse with. Familiarity makes the here and now easier to endure– especially when change is so constant. Plus, he’d be smarter than his dad. It’s no small thing to think/know you’re a little bit “better” than someone else.
Still, I think Ray would be better off inventing time travel and going back to get his father, rather than trying to rebuild him from scratch. Maybe Ray plans to do both– use a time machine to steal his father, them transfer his consciousness/essence into an avatar. Time travel and consciousness transfer both seem pretty far fetched. But optimism is generally regarded as preferable to death. And none of us in this discussion seem ready to die just yet.
Part of the appeal of the singularity is very similar to religious belief in eternal life. This is just a contemporary variation on it. Someone once speculated that people believe Jesus (or whoever) will return in their lifetimes and grant them eternal life because they can’t conceive of the continued existence of the world when they die. They can’t admit the possibility that they will cease to exist so they manufacture a belief system in which their existence will continue. And therefore the universe can continue too. And we have a new– and somewhat more believable– path to avoid death. Heaven vs. undying avatar. Spirit vs. silicon. Resurrection vs. technologically augmented evolution.
Maybe one of these belief systems is correct. As of now, they’re both built on a foundation of optimism. Personally, I’m becoming more resigned to the idea that my body will continue to wear out, my continued existence will become increasingly irrelevant to human advancement, and that I’ll eventually die. I’m not happy about it though. I used to wonder if I would be good enough to get into heaven. Now I wonder if I’ll live long enough to reach the singularity. Assuming I’ll be rich enough/smart enough/necessary enough to be preserved forever. But I can’t realistically see any of those three conditions being met. So does that make religion a rational path to choose?
by Chrispium
Generally speaking no. Illusions or hopes can’t make things real, you’ll need to be proactive in life and choose the strategies that will lengthen your existence the most in order to cross the three bridges to indefinite lifespan.
You say the singularity is similar to religion in it’s quest for eternal life but the distinguishing thing about religion is that it requires you to die before you can become immortal.
The singularity on the other hand is based in science and is trying to make your existence continue uninterrupted.
by Joe Thomas
Thought provoking. Thank you for taking the time to put your thoughts together in such a cogent and compelling way. Much to contemplate here. “Heaven vs. undying avatar. Spirit vs. silicon. Resurrection vs. technologically augmented evolution.” This will have my mind twirling for quite a while. Thanks again.
by Gorden Russell
I don’t believe that any interview of 20 hours could give you much of a copy of a persona. Neither do I believe that any silicon wafer of today could hold much of a personality. It will be like those chat bots that keep changing the subject and dodging the questions you ask.
But in years to come there will be something more advanced than the fMRI of today that will be able to copy every neuron and synapse of your brain and copy it over to a memristor brain laid out in a neural net.
When we can do this we can have robot avatars that can take long, arduous trips by ion drive craft that are too long for us to take. Then they can beam their experiences back into our organic brains.
I really want to explore the grooves on Ganymede and drill down to the hidden sea of Europa to look for organics. This just might be the way that the human race first does these things. I want to know these things; a robot copy of me would want to find these things out for itself. It would want to tell everybody about it’s discoveries, too.
by dfsfggrfrdfz
oh, and concerning this article, personality is one thing, consciousness is another
by dfsfggrfrdfz
Does anyone know when Ray kurzweil’s singularity is near movie is coming out?? :D can’t wait for it
by CarlBeckel
I don’t know. I watched most of the video and all I saw was text to speech, speech to text, a robot head, and a chat bot.
The concept is cool but based on the video I’m not convinced they did anything groundbreaking.
Then I looked on the site and confirmed my suspicions…
————————
WHY:
A proof of concept that one day mindfile information about a person may be used to re-animate that person’s consciousness. You can start your free mindfile at http://www.LifeNaut.com
ABILITIES:
Face Recognition, Voice Recognition, Facial Expressions, Head & Eye Movement, Motion Tracking, Internet Connectivity and Conversational ability.
———————-
So this is a “proof of concept” that personalities “might one day” be able to be put in a robot. Other than that it’s a physical chat-bot with some well written responses to questions about life and AI.
The fact that they call it the most advanced robot ever or whatever they said sets off my BS detector bigtime, also the video and website is all novelty and emotion and no technical substance. I’m not impressed.
by Tzigane
The difficulty with with approach is that the things you like or have seen, do not in fact represent the individual. They are artifacts, that a growing changing neural entity (the mind, took in at some particular moment. All of us could look at a set of photos, data and come up with differnet interpretations that reflect our own personal biasis. given two biologically equivelant neural systems, slight changes in the order of experiencing the same environments will lead to vastly different neural entities. I prefer the ‘Theseis’ approach, neural cell by cell replacement until the entire structure has been duplicated. still, this posses other problems as well. Including the difficulties of know how neural entities react and interact with other forms of memory, enzymes, etc. that make up the larger mind-body memory entitiy. Did I drink too much coffee this morning? Ps. slight discussion of this topic in my scifi book on my site.
by Brian H
Duplication is BS. Here’s the acid test: do you want a bio- or digital “avatar” to have access to your bank account?
by charles zeller
Consciousness must be physically transferred. The approach used in this experiment accomplishes nothing.
by Aaron
It looks like one of those creepy moms from Florida who has spent too much time in a tanning bed. She probably puts her 9 year old child in the tanning bed too long too and then subjects her to talent show competitions. I wouldn’t want a robot like that hanging around my house.
by Bri
Would it be more appealing if it were Maralyn Momroe or Clark Gable?
by Chrispium
Maralyn Momroe? umm? I suppose the other one should be Clark Garble then? ;P
by Bob Vasquez
As part of this glorious tranference, hopefully, ugly bigotry can be removed.
by Bri
Ray Kurzwiel is compiling a mind file of his deceased father. Many people would want to use it for similar sentimental reasons. Like the moving photos, or even our home movies, these would be far more multidimentional. As tome goes by, they will reflect more and more of our true selves. In my mind it’s possible to make an almost perfect copy. Whether it is biologically done, or virtually done, it could be indistinguishable from the original. I have a problem with the transfer and the gestation. To get your “spirit” into the new body, your preposing ending the old body (killing) and entering ( possessing) the new. If the new body is so good a being (alive), it may have someone in there already. Then you are either killing that entity, or supressing it. The way I see life, the new body will automatically draw forth it’s own soul. Your body is very attached to your soul. Pull the plug and it goes instantly down the drain, so to speak. Like falling into a black hole, space is full of nothing. Take any point, an atom say, and you can go infinitely inward. It’s like a holographic projection of space and time. It’s a relativity. It’s just information, nothing real. It appears real, but no atoms ever touch. It’s just force fields. Energy( the potential to do work) programed to do specific tasks, or to relate to other energy in a specific way. Information coding energy. So if you pull your plug, as it were, the lights go out. Now you have to turn it on again in the new body. Can be done, it’s just not so easy. Once your “on” in the new body, it had a center before you entered. So something was turned on before you came in. It may not go so easily. It may try to return if it was functionally alive, say like a cloned body, good luck getting it to leave. It will be drawn to the experience of being alive. The body is like a window to the other side. The driving force. It’s like a grounded circuit. The pull of life is strong. Everything is alive, just don’t expect that that life will know conversational French. My view is that even a rock is alive. It has a sense of I Am. It’s just far more ” unconscious” than a virus, and it’s all part of our collective unconsciousness. We make this holodeck together, or should I say we are sparks off the energy, that’s doing the work. Just think about that and entanglement. Just vibrating strings in eleven dimensions.
by Augustus
You make some valid points, worthy of further contemplation. I’ve considered mind transfer for years. And I have noticed the lure of it. Immortality. No matter how a poet waxes about the end of things. No one really wants to take that journey. No one has done so and came back to tell what, if anything, is on the other side. Religions talk about it. Heaven and hell. But those are just theories, ideas w/ no bases in fact constructed to give some measure of confort to the dying and those who are next in line. Personally, I consider death a great waist of resourse and potential. Imagine if Da Vinci or Einstien had never died, but continued on to make discoveries. The old saying: Those who learn not from history, are destine to repeat it again. This is so true. How many times through past centuries has man “discovered” how to do the same thing over and over again? Back when I was just a lad in ancient times. There was a magnificent library in a place called Alexandria. This library housed copies of ever great discovery ever known. But a terrible calamity befell the land of Virgina and the great library was destroyed by invading hordes of democrates. Imagine what might have been, if only the great library had been spared. Of course I have tried to make light here and there, but the story is still basically true. Knowledge once it is lost, has to be found again before it can be used. And how much suffering will there be until that is accomplished?
by Marcos Marin
Those hordes of democrats.. always causing trouble.
by Gorden Russell
Wait a minute! The army that marched through Virginia and occupied Alexandria all voted for Lincoln in 1864. They were Republicans!
by rob falgiano
Mortality gives urgency and purpose to life. Given infinite time maybe Einstein would have spent more time daydreaming than pursuing his theories. Who knows. Essentially immortal beings would have such a foreign mindset it is hard to imagine what their motivations would be. I’m not convinced immortality is entirely desirable. Am still contemplating the idea.
by Chrispium
It wont be forced on you, you’ll get to choose if you want it or not. If you regret the choice it can (most likely) be reversed as long as you’re alive.
by Gabor
Bri – God, Devil, Heaven, Hell, Soul are just simple words for explaining the unknown. I’d rather discover the unknown than take the word of other humans who just DO NOT KNOW!!! We will get our mind – aka “Spirit” in the new body by upgrading the current one to the point where the original will be a negligible part of the whole “new body”. You have millions of cells dying every day and being replaced as we speak. Somehow those new cells become your body (and Soul in your terms) without you missing the ones that had died. When we perfect the technology to introduce new synthetic cells to the body, that is the beginning of the process of “uploading”. It is proven that the brain can transfer tasks if something happens to one part of it (like learning to speak again after a stroke). In the process of uploading, our consciousness will gradually shift to the more capable synthetic cells. Don’t think of it as we are overtaking a smarter collection of cells (body) but we gradually change to become that new body. It’s like learning, when you learn something new, that knowledge automatically becomes you and erases the you from before (the one that didn’t have that knowledge). Uploading is just like learning, except much faster and more capable.
Think about this. I’m not saying this is how uploading will happen but just a simple way of explaining one possibility. If you do believe that cells are replacing themselves continuously in our current biological body then you can easily imagine the following: What if we prevented new biological cells to be born and for every cell that dies create a synthetic one in it’s place that never dies. Eventually, all of our biological cells would be replaced. Would the mind (Soul) be still there or would it leave the body gradually with the dying cells?
by Bri
Every post on this subject I have stated that a gradual transition retains continuity. It’s the radical coping that won’t produce the same results. Keep your body alive while creating another independent, fully functional ” clone”, whether biological or machine, then you have a twin. How do you propose to gradually replace Ina fashion similar to the trillions of cells that change regularly? Cut off a n arm first? As Ray say’s in SN, you could replace your heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver with respiracites. I agree totally. You can change your genetic code to make bones of carbon fiber. Not a problem. It’s when you creat a vessel to upload to, that I think, when the time comes, that it ain’t gonna be so easy. If you upload directly to a computational substrate and then destroy your body, thinking your in the machine, that you’ll find it’s just a facsimile. Could be wrong, but from what I see, I think I am! It’s fun to talk about but nobody will know for sure, till we do it!
by Gabor
I agree, it’s hard to imagine to have a mind in one body and then suddenly transfer it to another and not have it in the previous. It is not possible as of today. “Lawnmower Man” is not the way to upload. It’s a way to copy/clone and destroy the original. That’s where most of the confusion is coming from. I wish we called “mind uploading”, something like “mind expanding” instead. As of now I’m not capable of imagining multiple consciousness of the same original consciousness so in that sense cutting the original body off is murder. My argument is that when we are ready, our one consciousness will be so greatly expanded over the original body that cutting off a little peace will not affect the expanded whole of the original consciousness which is say a million times bigger then what we started with. So we will not cut an arm off, we will transform the original body (that might be already all synthetic by then) on the atomic level to be further and even more efficient building material for the higher level consciousness that is the continuation of our original mind.
Most of us tend to jump the gun and interpolate our current technology with the possibilities of what we can do in the future. There will be no cutting/butchering, only atomic (or even smaller) level manipulation. It will be seamless and painless. When we are ready, we will transform without the need for interrupting the continuity of the mind which we all agree would preserve us and not create a different being while murdering the original.
by Murray K
I agree with your comments here. Though I believe the replacement of the mind/body will start with enhancement and gradual piece by piece replacement so that we incorporate and integrate our new abilities as the whole. The original will become old redundant parts.
by Gorden Russell
My old bones ache like Hell. I’ll be glad to replace them with carbon nanotubes.
by Brian H
Duplication is BS. If you can make 1 copy, you can make 2, or 20.
by Mike Hanley
It seems a bit creepy – I’d rather it had like a Hello Kitty face or something
by Gorden Russell
You’ll have that if you want it.
by GatorALLin
I have to admit that I see a massive difference from being able to transfer your memories and even thoughts vs. your consciousness and don’t ever think this is possible to bridge that gap. Sure you might make some type of Turing test that fools someone else into thinking it was you, but at best you might end up yourself feeling like you made a copy, but Never that you transferred your consciousness. For me this idea is flawed from the very start…. Yeah I can see why they think it would be clever to do it as though this gives you some trick to live forever… the problem is in the “you” part. There is a huge difference with making pictures, stories, memories into a soul or a consciousness…. Fail!
by travistx
exactly! if your still you…..then who are they? they would be a copy of you or a reproduction based on you. but not you…..just a copy of you.
by Starheart
The question is, what would we gain from replicating personalities? Maybe in this way the unique skill of a scientist or an artist can ultimately be digitized, analyzed and reverse-engineered, but other than this I see little benefit in virtual wax figures. This has nothing to do with actual mind uploading. One thing it can potentially become is create a seed of sorts for an AI – but do we really need AIs emulating a person rather than developing traits of their own?
by Sherrie
Personally I would prefer to have AI with human based data rather than machine generated. Can a machine generate compassion, kindness, tolerance and humor? so far it seems some features of these traits can be created but all of them in one Ai seems both unlikely and many many years away, if ever. Using human based knowledge and neurology might make it possible sooner rather than later. Given the fact that robots can be easily engineered to be stronger than humans finding ways to have these traits in place might help smooth human-robot society as it develops.
by Mortran
Of course a machine would generate kindness and tolerance. These are essential types of behavior. Not having them would be suicidal, because you would make too many enemies.
It might be different for compassion and humor. But I am not sure if they are desirable.
Compassion led to a dangerous increase of weak people in the population who would actually be unfit for life. Therefore the whole society is becoming weaker and weaker, because the wrong virtues are rewarded.
Humor is just useless. It has no purpose at all. It is like what Google recently said about their virtual assistant. He/she will not make jokes. When you ask Google, you want an answer, not a joke.
by Gorden Russell
If Google would joke with me, I wouldn’t use Bing.
by Gabor
Sherrie, when we have machines with brains similar to the complexity of the human brain, those machines will have similar thoughts and feelings albeit only for a short time. Remember, technological advancement is exponential. They will reach our complexity and then exceed it fast, developing even more complex feelings or states that we don’t even have words or even an idea of as those require ever more complexity than what currently fits in our skulls.
I have a feeling that we will have little control over how machines evolve. We kind of give them the tools and they will gradually take over their own evolution as we took over ours from nature.
by James
so we would be like mother nature. The nature we came from has let us go and now we are become a nature for a new spicies to emerge out of like a black pool of formlessness. and when the machines look back to us for answers they will find none as we have found only qeustions.
by rob falgiano
I agree. Artificial intelligence will diverge greatly from humanity as it surpasses us intellectually, even if the AI is originally derived from human beings or has a human identity.
by Bri
I know it’s a hard sell, to tell you those emotions are an evolutionary trait, to increase the chances for survival, but it’s all part of the dopamine circuit. You go through withdrawal symptoms if your without these qualities in some degree. Even Saddam insane had a family life. Think of all you like to do, now think there is no one else on the planet. Never was, never will be. How much fun is that stuff anymore. We are not tree spiders. We NEED other people. It gives us an advantage over other creatures that don’t pass knowledge down from generation to generation, like sea turtles. It can easily be replicated in machines.