Robot Clones of Real Humans
When I tell people that I work on artificial intelligence, people that are not from my domain generally ask two questions about the near future: 1. Can robots take over the world? 2. Can I clone myself into a robot?
Actually, the idea beyond these questions come from the movies and series. In this blog, I’m going to talk about the second question. Can I clone myself into a robot?
Why do people want to clone themselves into a robot? The people who ask this question generally say that it would be excellent if I stay at home, travel or do whatever I want while my robot clone goes to work and earn money. If this scenario was real, it would be great. My robot clone would write this blog for me while the real me was sleeping.
Right now, there is no way to clone yourself into a robot which is 100% you in terms of your physical appearance, your motion (your walking style, your mimics, your posture etc.), your behavior, your reactions, your emotions, your mind and so on. There are studies and products that can clone you partially. However, we’re not quite able to clone a real human completely into a robot yet.
Now, let’s talk about the partial cloning. Your voice can be cloned in 5 seconds. Your face, your mimics and so many other parts of yourself can be cloned too. The hardest part to clone is your mind. Studies about mind cloning still continues.
There have been several attempts for mind cloning but they haven’t been successful enough yet. For example, Bina-48. Martine Rothblatt created a mind clone of her wife, Bina Aspen. The cloned mind is installed into a robotically animated head. Here is the conversation of the real Bina Aspen and Bina-48.
As we can see in the video, Bina-48 is a social robot based on Bina Aspen but it is not the exact mind copy of Bina-Aspen.
Hanson Robotics says that “In 2017, she made history: She is the first robot ever to enroll in and successfully complete a college level class, a philosophy course at Notre Dame de Namur University, in California.”.
There are more social robots like Nadine, Sophia and so on. These robots are also humanoid robots. A humanoid robot is a robot with a human-like body. If a humanoid robot aesthetically resembles humans, it is called android. Humanoid robots are developed to have specific tasks and functions. They are so similar to humans regarding these tasks and functions but they are not replicates of specific humans. You can take a look at Hanson Robotics for different human-like robots.
The challenge is to produce not only a human-like robot but also an exact copy of a human.
Last month, a Russian startup called Promot has started to sell robot clones of real humans. It clones the physical appearance of a human. The idea is to build a robot with any human appearance. It has 600 distinct facial expressions in order to be life-like. It also has three degrees of freedom head control. However, it cannot walk.
The company states that “Everyone will now be able to order a robot with any appearance — for professional or personal use. Thus, we open a huge market in service, education and entertainment. Imagine a replica of Michael Jordan selling basketball uniforms and William Shakespeare reading his own texts in a museum? — says Aleksei Iuzhakov, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Promobot. — We can build a linguistic model based on popular phrases of a particular person — the robot will communicate and answer questions by analyzing frequent expressions of the “original” and using a certain context of knowledge of this person.”
This robot can also work in different scopes such as consultant, office employee, administrator, and home assistant. If your job is one of them, your clone may replace you to some extent but everyone will understand that it’s a robot. Your clone should be indistinguishable from you in order to earn money while your clone works.
So, when will our dream come true? When will we produce a human-like robot that can function and be perceived as a human in every aspect? When will we have a successful robot clone of ourselves?
