It's official, folks: the future is now. Sure, we still don't have hovercraft cars -- yet -- but between the government building imperial walkers and American Apparel hawking all the metallic spandex a girl can carry, yesterday's science fiction is looking pretty tangible and bright. What's more, like any good piece of science fiction, the future promises to be filled to the brim with robots.

The latest offering to be brought to the robot table comes out of Fudan University in Shanghai. He has no given name yet, but what the cute little Rosie the Robot-type roller does have is voice recognition and some seriously sophisticated AI, notably the ability to continuously learn and memorize new commands.

The most critical part inside the nearly one-meter high robot is a voice receiving and recognition system, which enables the robot to memorize commands.

For instance, people can take the robot into the kitchen and tell it "here's the kitchen," and familiarize it with other rooms.The robot remembers the locations and formulates an electronic map it can use to navigate. When people utter a command such as "go to the kitchen," the robot will be able to search its memory and move to the destination, Fudan researchers said.

It can also function as an interactive television that allows people to select TV programs by voice orders.

At the fair site, when demonstrators asked the robot to "tell us something about the 17th Party Congress," video about president Hu Jintao delivering speech on the latest Party congress immediately appeared on the robot's chest screen.

It all sounds like trivial tasks, but it's just baby steps. Speech recognition has been around for a couple of years now, but is mostly confined to very specific rote branches of information. Learning how to respond, comprehend, and compile new memories based on any new given command is one stop closer on the express railway to building complex conversation programs for Wife 2.0.

Meanwhile, apparently my home country is setting me up for grand disappointment -- Lance Ulanoff over at PC Magazine just published an editorial on why the United States might be behind the times when it comes to welcoming our new robot overlords. It is definitely a relevant parallel, considering our newest aforementioned friend hails from Shanghai, and his piece brings up some interesting points, starting with how depictions and emotions toward mechanical friends differs back around on the other side of the Pacific.

In the book Loving the Machine, author Timothy N. Hornyak explains that robots (or at least automatons) have been part of the Japanese culture for hundreds of years. They're seen as friends, helpers, entertainers, and companions.

Here, I thought of the robot in Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky -- though huge and lumbering in appearance, he nevertheless proved friendly, as the devoted infinite guardian of the castle gardens and all who lived therein. Which is nice, right?

So what's our problem then, doc? Why do more realistic robot toys sell so poorly over here? Why are American grandmas getting their knickers all in a bunch over a damned Roomba when the future of AI is on the line? Ulanoff, examining our Western culture, seems to find the answer in 19th-century psychology.

The more powerful and realistic AIBO became (the final version, the ERS-7, looked remarkably like a plastic-covered dog), the less interest Americans showed. American consumers fixate on anthropomorphism and generally find androids and even android pets grotesque. [...] There's an obvious comfort level with the now five-year-old iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner. It doesn't look like us or any of our pets. We understand that there is some intelligence in there, but we are not threatened by it. If iRobot had made a 4-foot-tall Roomba with a face and a hand to hold a vacuum hose, the company wouldn't have sold more than ten units. Instead, it sold more than two million Frisbee-shaped, personality-free bots.

Actually, Lance, the word you're searching for isn't so much "grotesque," but rather one of Sigmund Freud's favorite buzzwords this side of cigars, "uncanny."

In the first place, if psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.

Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that what the average person finds most threatening and creepy are things that are perfectly commonplace, and yet, at the same time, wholly alien. It's why The Twilight Zone was so popular, and it's how Stephen King makes millions of dollars on horror stories like Cujo (an ordinary dog... of EVIL!) and Christine (an ordinary car... OF EVIL!!!). More relevantly, it's why Optimus Prime at his most photogenic still looks like a mack truck, while the smartest thing the CGI artists working on that Will Smith I, Robot debacle ever did was capping the robots' spindly wire bodies with soft, thoughtful, and ultimately cruel human faces.

Ulanoff also offers another possible explanation for the Western world's unwillingness to embrace the bots: we just care too damn much. It's a lot to swallow, but given what a tear-jerker that Haley Joel Osment robot movie was, it's not out of the question.

Perhaps Americans' inability to accept complex robotics has something to do with our tendency to generate emotional attachments to inanimate objects. We shower our cars, homes, and boats with the affection we should be directing to, say, our children. Add just a touch of intelligence and interaction and our engagement increases exponentially. According to the Associated Press, a recent Georgia Tech study found that iRobot Roomba owners were naming, assigning gender, and even dressing their robots. Maybe a real robot boy would simply overload our emotions. In South Korea, officials are already worried about physical and emotional abuse between humans and robots. Granted, Pacific Rim countries are at the forefront of robotics development, but such proposals only hold robotic development up to ridicule and further confuse Americans who already spend sleepless nights worrying about suicidal robots, too-friendly robots, sex robots, and a robot uprising.

Though I want to stop and dwell for a bit on the embarrassing ludicrousness of people dressing up their Roombas, the real point of the quote is a study in contradictions. On the one hand, as an intelligent nation, replicants creep us the fuck out. On the other hand, the idea of being duped by a hot Jude Law-Bot who may never truly love us back... well, it creeps us out. To a point, I can buy it. It's every wildest fear -- eradication vs. abandonment -- all rolled into one. Who would have thought robots would make people so emotional?

Ulanoff does stress that the robot revolution will come, subtly or otherwise, whether the United States accepts it or not. I, for one, prefer to think of the robot revolution as a kindlier Studio Ghibli sky-garden sort, that might just be a childhood spent in Japan talking. �e la vie.

Thank you, Slashdot.

Evilgasm

Netherlands

April 2007

NOV 10, 2007 04:38 AM

I, for one, prefer to think of the robot revolution as a kindlier Studio Ghibli sky-garden sort,

I suspect it'll look more like ZOIDS.

StarBelliedBoy

Philadelphia, PA

December 2003

NOV 10, 2007 05:00 AM

GIGANTORRRRRRRRR

TAFKASP

Oakland, CA

June 2003

NOV 10, 2007 05:08 AM

If we Americans don't start loving anthropomorphic robots soon, we will never have the pleasure of seeing them do "The Robot". (One's Roomba may vacuum a rug okay, but let's see that fucker cut a rug like a biped!)

And I want to know what Steve Gutenberg has to say about all of this.

EDITED TO ADD: I <3 Robots (except for the Roomba). Charlatan!

ki1

Ireland

September 2007

NOV 10, 2007 05:33 AM

i want a robot who will 'go to the kitchen' and 'fetch me a cold brew from the fridge'
'bad robot, bad robot, i don't want orange juice, i want beer'

Fatality

SUICIDEGIRL

Connecticut, USA

NOV 10, 2007 06:24 AM

What's the learning process? It is based on a top-down input system or does associate values?

etc.

KingMike

Westfield, NY

October 2006

NOV 10, 2007 08:56 AM

Humanoid robots=bad

Munke

Chula Vista, CA

May 2004

NOV 10, 2007 09:00 AM

I know of at least one person who's welcoming our robot vacuum overlords...