I, Fashion Robot and Carla Bruni

If  innovation, mystery and human ambiguity are references points, then for example:

..Is it not still a long way until the Japanese new fashion model robot will have the look of former top model Carla Bruni and today’s wife of french president Nicolas Sarkozy. How can the french chic of such a beautiful women..be hardwired into a robot..

And further.  Who does not remember the beautiful android in “Blade Runner“,  the actress Sean Young  as Rachael,  a replicant with limited sexual memories.

Perhaps it’s not fair to compare the Japanese fashion robot with Sean Young as the replicant. In the love scene between her and  Deckard, the scene suggest, that despite her inexperience in love matters, she has a human magic suggestivity lacking in our robot fashion HRP-4C in the role of a top fashion model . Rachael, as a replicant, has surely Carla Bruni’s class and much more. Whole audiences in the screening theaters are and where overwhelmed by her pervading  emotional erotic charm.

The following comment ( You Tube) on the love scene between Rachael and Deckard, resume those emotions in a few keywords, love, human, android, soul, robot and technology. Our ambiguous feelings confered those attributes to Rachael and forget that she is pseudo human and not a perfect human replica:

“What I love the most about this movie and it’s” love” theme is two things: One… that, if human beings could reach such levels of technology and create a biological android does such creature have a soul? Or furthermore, Do they have a soul and second…can they love? Soul and Love. From a human perspective and as viewer we love Rachel and feel for her plight. We love her as a woman that potentially she is not from the outside but from the inside. Emotion is captivated more than a view. ” see here page 2.

The same can not be said about our new fashion robot:

..”For the first time ever, a robot walked a fashion runway today in Tokyo. Well it didn’t exactly walk, but sort of wobbled like someone waking from an anesthesia-induced stupor. Although this was a great feat in the robotics industry, don’t expect HRP-4C, the Cybernetic fashion model, to hit another catwalk anytime soon because her signature walk needs a lot of work.”.. see here.

So from the real   fashion model robot HRP-4C, back in time to  Philip K. Dicks novel  “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”  to Ridley Scott’s movie  ‘ Blade Runner’  where android Rachael with  the help of the Tyrell corporation is hardwired for humanlike  acting, we come again to our own days where real initiatives are taken to creating  acting robots. And indeed  here is an example of such an initiative:

But Bilge Mutlu and colleague’s team at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, is changing that with robots that “leak” non-verbal information through eye movements when interacting with humans. The eyes of a robot may not provide a window into its soul, but they can help humans guess the machine’s intentions.

Humans constantly give off non-verbal cues and interpret the signals of others – but without realising it at a conscious level, says Mutlu. The trembling hands of a public speaker betray their nerves even before a word is uttered, while poker players leak subtle signs such as eye flickers or twitches that can be used to spot bluffers.

But when faced with a robot all our interpretive skills are irrelevant. Robots leak no information, so it is virtually impossible to read their intentions, which makes them hard to get along with.”…

Anyway, human actors, like Sean Young as Rachael and Robin Williams in the ‘Bicentennial Man’, are playing the role of robots and androids much better than robots are playing the role of human beings. The bottom logic is that humans are programming the robots very badly,

But who knows what the future is hidden from us. It seems that to socialise with robots in Facebook in the future is not so unrealistic.. Or perhaps, in going one step further, humanlike robots will invent their own social network FaceRobots, where the real humans will be  considered as an old invention of some evolutionary Darwinian process.

If you don’t believe me then please read this:

…”No name is linked more tightly to the idea of the Singularity, see here and here, than that of Vernor Vinge, 63, who for four decades has written stories about the ways humanity and its technologies are building a future that may be impossible for us even to imagine. “It seems plausible,” Vinge says, “that with technology we can, in the fairly near future, create or become creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such a singular event are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.”…see here.