Love in the Time of Robots

Alex Mar Love in the Time of Robots t is summer 2002, midmorning in a university research lab on Ithe edge of Osaka, Japan. Two girls— both dressed in pale yel- low, with child- puffy cheeks, black shoulder- length hair, and bangs— stand opposite each other under fluorescent lights. More precisely: One is a girl, five years old; the other is her copy, her android replica. They are the same size, one modeled on the other, and they are meeting for the first time. The girl stares hard into the eyes of her counterpart; its expres- sion is stern and stiff. It seems to return her gaze. A man is videotaping the pair— he is the father of one, creator of the other— and from off- camera he asks, “Would you like to say something?” The girl turns to him, disoriented. She turns back to the android. “Talk to her!” he says. “Hello.” The girl repeats the word, quietly, to her robot- self. It nods. Her father feeds her another line: “Let’s play.” The android wiggles its head. Her father chuckles behind the camera. But the girl does not budge. She simply stares at her double, the look on her face one of focus and perhaps concern. Each member of this pair continues making the barely there gestures that serve, through reflex or ruse, as signs of life: Each blinks at regular intervals; each tilts her head from side to side. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/3/2020 12:44 AM via CHULALONGKORN UNIV AN: 1918738 ; The American Society of Magazine Editors.; The Best American Magazine Writing 2018 Copyright 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Account: chulalun.main.eds 436 Alex Mar One is processing, in the raw, sensory- overload manner of a human child; the other is performing a series of simple movements made possible by the servomotors installed inside the sili- cone casing that is its skin. “Is it difficult to play with her?” the father asks. His daughter looks to him, then back at the android. Its mouth begins to open and close slightly, like a dying fish. He laughs. “Is she eating something?” The girl does not respond. She is patient and obedient and lis- tens closely. But something inside is telling her to resist. “Do you feel strange?” her father asks. Even he must admit that the robot is not entirely believable. Eventually, after a few long minutes, the girl’s breathing grows heavier, and she announces, “I am so tired.” Then she bursts into tears. That night, in a house in the suburbs, her father uploads the footage to his laptop for posterity. His name is Hiroshi Ishiguro, and he believes this is the first record of a modern- day android. • • • In the fifteen years since, Ishiguro has produced some thirty androids, most of them female. They have included replicas of a newscaster, an actress, and a fashion model. These androids have made numerous public appearances— in cafés and department stores, singing in malls, performing in a play. Mostly, though, Ishiguro’s brood of pretty “women” is used for his academic experiments, many of which are conducted at two locations in Japan: the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Nara and the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory on the campus of Osaka University. The lab, known as IRL, is embedded within a maze of aus- tere, gray university buildings. In one of these industrial boxes, EBSCOhost - printed on 4/3/2020 12:44 AM via CHULALONGKORN UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 437 Love in the Time of Robots about thirty students and assistant professors work in a series of near- silent computer pods and observation rooms. Teams of young men shuffle down the long, linoleum- lined hallways in sweatshirts, pace the research rooms in their socks, or hover over laptops in rows, heads down, subsisting mostly on Red Bull, crackers, and Pocky Sticks. (Women do not seem like a natural fit here. As if to underline this fact, a sign by the restrooms reads, “Watch out for male strangers in the ladies toilet.”) Presiding over this disheveled scene is Ishiguro- sensei. He is immediately recognizable, looking just as he does in promotional photos from recent years: perfectly mod in slim- fitting black with matching leather backpack and fanny pack. He wears tinted hex- agonal glasses and styles his jet- black hair into a mop top that swoops across his forehead. This is his department: Ishiguro, fifty- four, is a distinguished professor at one of the country’s top uni- versities, with two labs, partnerships with a dozen private com- panies throughout Japan, a recent $16 million grant from the government (one of its most generous in science and engineering, he says), and seven secretaries to manage it all. Today, the technical ability to produce a robot that truly looks and moves and speaks like a human remains well beyond our reach. Even further beyond our grasp is the capacity to imbue such a machine with humanness— that ineffable presence the Jap- anese call sonzai- kan. Because to re- create human presence we need to know more about ourselves than we do— about the accu- mulation of cues and micromovements that trigger our empa- thy, put us at ease, and earn our trust. Someday we may crack the problem of creating artificial general intelligence— a machine brain that can intuitively perform any human intellectual task— but why would we choose to interact with it? Ishiguro believes that since we’re hardwired to interact with and place our faith in humans, the more humanlike we can make a robot appear, the more open we’ll be to sharing our lives with EBSCOhost - printed on 4/3/2020 12:44 AM via CHULALONGKORN UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 438 Alex Mar it. Toward this end, his teams are pioneering a young field of research called human- robot interaction. HRI is a hybrid discipline: part engineering, part AI, part social psychology and cognitive science. The aim is to analyze and cultivate our evolving relationship with robots. HRI seeks to understand why and when we’re willing to interact with and maybe even feel affection for a machine. And with each android he produces, Ishiguro believes he is moving closer to building that trust. In a secluded room at IRL, a collection of androids is stored and maintained: his hardest workers. Arranged in this space today, with its blackout curtains, thin corporate carpeting, and shelves cluttered with cables and monitors and an array of wigs, is a pair of his replicas of grown women. They are models of the Geminoid F series. The name is a play offgeminus (Latin for “twin”), a reminder that their human counterparts exist some- where in the world. At any given time, students and staff may be testing, measur- ing, and recording the responses of dozens of volunteers to the androids at their disposal. What about its behavior or appearance, its specific facial expressions and minute body movements, do they find alienating? What draws them closer? These androids are used to find answers to an ever- growing list of research questions: How important is nonverbal communication to establishing trust between humans (and, therefore, between human and android)? Under what circumstances might we treat an android like a human? In this way, Ishiguro’s collective of labs is dedicated to the engineering of human intimacy. • • • Over the several months we are in contact, Ishiguro will share information that strikes me as deeply personal: He has contem- plated suicide twice in his life; though he has a family, he EBSCOhost - printed on 4/3/2020 12:44 AM via CHULALONGKORN UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 439 Love in the Time of Robots considers himself a lonely man. I will hear him use that word to describe himself— lonely— about half a dozen times. As for me, when I first visit Ishiguro, my situation is this: I am twenty- three months away from what had seemed like the start of a serious relationship but was not. I am fifteen months away from a rebound relationship that lingered too long. I am thirteen months into a period of spending long stints in a small town in upstate New York for the sake of productive quiet. I’m readying a book to go to the printers— work that, for me, is all- consuming and necessary. And lately, when I step back from the manuscript for an afternoon or at night, I feel it: isolation. This isolation is not complete— I have my close friends, a wider circle of less- close friends, my family— but it is the absence of intimacy. Nothing romantic, no sexual life. This absence has been, in part, a choice; certain men have always been curious about me. But what I miss more than sex is the feeling of closeness with another person, something I’ve never believed could be conjured up. And though the sensory depriva- tion has become a little extreme, most of the time— can I put a percentage on it? Is it as high as 80 percent?— I do not think about it. I am semiradically independent and some kind of artist and in many ways an unconventional liberal woman. However alienating, for me this is a time of deep creativity. It’s that additional 20 percent of the time— that’s when I feel dizzy.

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