Then
d
n
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NOW
ROBOTS — FROM HUMANOID
TO HUMAN STATUS
by Tom Carroll
Itake a lot of technical magazines,
more than my postman or wife care to
see. Many of them have very interesting
viewpoints on technology and robotics.
One is Managing Automation — a
magazine concerned mostly with
implementation of factory automation
and robotics. MA has a monthly
e-newsletter that covers many
automation subjects. The August 1st
issue had an interesting article entitled
“More Human than Humans” by
MA Editor-in-Chief, David R. Brousell.
He wrote the following:
“If you haven’t seen the new Pixar
animation movie, Wall-E, go see it
soon. It’s a story of a garbage
compactor robot named Wall-E who
finds love and humanity on a desolate
and abandoned planet earth.”
“The film is both poignant and funny,
apocalyptic and hopeful. It also has, in
addition to the good robots like Wall-E,
evil robots that want to control and
subjugate human beings. One of these
evil robots recalls HAL, the murderous
computer in the 1969 film 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Certain stereotypes die hard.”
“Being a technology journalist, one
of the things that struck me most about
FIGURE 1. Reborn Sarah.
78 SERVO 10.2008
Wall-E was, of course, the human qualities
assigned to the robots. They sense,
they feel, they can be happy or sad.”
“Is all this really science fiction?
Will the day come when we will be able
to program robots with such sensibilities?
And what happens to us in the meantime? As the movie Wall-E depicts, the
remaining human beings, if you want
to call them that, are barely more than
overstuffed blobs living in a sensory
and climate-controlled space station.
Wall-E and his female robot companion
act more human than the humans.”
“But hope remains eternal, even
for the blobs. Perhaps robots of the
future will end up showing us the way
if indeed we do forget what we are.”
That was a great article and it made
me think. It brought back memories
when I was young and saw the anima-tronic Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland. I
thought, “Wow! In a few years, we’ll be
seeing robots on the street that are
indistinguishable from humans.” Well,
that was many years ago and we’re still
not there, but many people are hard at
work making that day a reality. A year
ago, I wrote about humanoid robots
in this column. Humanoids are cool as
they are as close to us as anything we
can build. The vain creatures that we
are, we humans seem to be in love with
anything that resembles even a likeness
to ourselves. Sometimes that goes a
bit too far, in my humble opinion.
In the past several months, I’ve seen
articles in the news about ‘fake babies.’
In several cases, police have been called
to break into locked cars in order to
‘rescue’ a seemingly live baby on the
seat of the car. The embarrassed
police were then introduced to what
is known as a reborn baby.
The technique called ‘reborning’
has grown quite a bit since 2000 as
doll collectors and hobbyists have so
refined the process of creating a life-like
baby doll that the result is very spooky,
to say the least. For centuries, artists
also have so refined art on a canvass
to create portraits that seem as real as
photographs. No tiny detail is missed.
The reborn doll creators usually start
with a vinyl toy doll, remove the factory
paint and carefully apply soft skin-tone
colorants to simulate real skin. Quite
often, customers may order a reborn
that resembles them. These might include
simulated veins under the skin, milk spots
for a newborn, special shading, and
finger/toe nails are added. The reborn’s
hair is usually premium mohair, but
sometimes real baby’s hair is used.
Figure 1 from Bushel and a Peck
— a site for reborns — shows a very
lifelike baby. Later models have used
vinyl-silicone polymers for a very realistic
skin, with rubber-covered glass pellets
in the body for realistic weight and a
squishy, baby-like feel. Heartbeat and
breathing simulators add realistic lifelikeness to the baby, and even a crying
box rounds out the robot baby.
As a robotics enthusiast and sci-fi
reader, my mind seemed to venture
towards an evil creature like Chucky,
rather than a lovable baby. eBay has
thousands of reborns listed, from less
than $100 to thousands of dollars to
satisfy the needs of those who desire an
