ROBOTS GET CUDDLY | April 1st 2008

Geoff Johnson

The snuggling Ifbot will sing to you, Actroid DER will greet you with a smile. Dominic Ziegler gets up close and personal with the tangle of actuators and wire that the Japanese count as friends...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Spring 2008

The children were on the floor making robots--everything from an old milk carton and simple electric motor, to figures full of wires and struts able to kick a football into goal. It was the cluttered Osaka workshop of Tatsutsugu Yoshitani, a 59-year-old, twinkling robot builder, which he runs with his friend Kazuhiro "Doc" Ohno, who repairs the blind, the halt and the infirm of the robot world. And then I popped the bubble of joy with a casual question, typical of the Westerner, instantly regretted: presumably what the children really liked building were attack machines that waged full-blown robot war on the workshop floor? The Doc looked at me as if I needed help. Yoshitani stopped mid-stream: "Robots", he said slowly and gently, "are not just machines. They are friends. Sumo wrestling: that's okay. But killing other robots: it's a taboo."

My question had betrayed a chasm of ignorance. In Japan people "feel love for robots", as Doc put it, and want to care for them. They give robots human qualities--kawaii, "cute", is perhaps Japan's most squealed word. Robots are not threatening or alienating, they create feelings of security, comfort and companionship. Their cuteness tips over into the cloying. Don't misunderstand me. I was not taken with Western notions of robots as a threat--of Daleks and Terminators. But I could take them or leave them.

At least, that is what I thought. Later that day I was at ATR, a government-funded research institute in a high-tech suburb outside Kyoto. Takayuki Kanda was my guide, a 32-year-old with an elegant wave of grey hair and an angelic patience. His lab gave off an aura of wide-eyed wonder much like the children's workshop, but the chest-high robots in varying states of assembly showed an incomparable degree of complexity. The morning's anarchic exuberance had been replaced by a Zen-like silence, as researchers worked at their terminals.

Kanda showed me a video of field tests of a stationary English-speaking robot, 120cm high, that had been put in a primary school for two weeks to see how children reacted to it--and it to them. At first, the children were enthused. Each pupil could be identified by a radio tag. If the child came close, the computer might call out the child's name and propose playing a language game. This was exciting, but with so many children crowding about, the robot couldn't cope. It got confused. It overheated. Sometimes it had to shut down and rest. And a curious thing happened: I felt a twinge of sympathy for it.

After a few days, the children lost interest. But even then, one or two would go over to the robot because no one was playing with it. How cute, I found myself thinking.

The word "robot" first appeared in 1921, in a play by the Czech writer Karel Capek. It depicted a dystopia in which human clones are assembled--a robotnik was a medieval Czech serf condemned to a life of drudgery. But the slaves rebel, all but destroying the human race. Robots followed in the footsteps of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein--human technical power run amok.

But not in Japan. Late last year Tokyo's giant biennial robot show opened to packed crowds. Fuji Heavy Industries showed off "Tondon", named after a snake in Balinese mythology: it acts as a robotic janitor that uses global positioning, gyroscopes and optical sensors to wander about buildings singing "Mary had a little lamb" while cleaning floors and sweeping leaves; it can even operate the lift.

Sanrio boasted Actroid DER, a Hello Kitty-loving "fembot"--a female android--whose limbs, upper body and facial expressions are meant to look lifelike with the help of air-powered actuators imitating muscle movements. By synchronising voice and body language, Actroid DER can greet and look decorative--just like Japan's army of corporate "OLs", or office ladies. Kokoro is for hire for conventions and the like, for ¥400,000 ($3,750) for five days. In a similar vein, Nippon Dental University has developed a pretty woman called Simroid, with sensors in her mouth and on her chest. She cries "ouch" if students handle her rudely and "thank you" if they are gentle.

Two salarymen each cuddled a "Real Care Baby", on sale for just ¥68,000. With today's lower birth rate, one explained, parents-to-be have little experience of young children. Thanks to these dolls, they can practise changing nappies and feeding. A nipple sensor clips to the pocket of your suit jacket, which links to a sensor in the one-month-old baby's mouth: suckle long enough, and it expresses satisfaction. If you let the baby's head drop back, it bursts into tears, and you must rock and cuddle it to sleep in penance.

In search of insight, I made a pilgrimage to the whimsical museum dedicated to Tetsuwan Atomu--Mighty Atom or Astroboy in English--and the late Osamu Tezuka, the robot's bulb-nosed creator in a French beret and big square glasses. Mighty Atom, prince among manga characters, was an instant hit when it first appeared in 1951 as a series. Twelve years later it became Japan's first animated television series, an even greater success. Rare is the Japanese who cannot sing the theme tune about an atomic-powered robot-boy with searchlight eyes, ears a thousand times sharper than ours and an ability to shoot bullets from his backside. His fans say that he summed up a sense that tomorrow could be brighter than today.

The museum is in Takarazuka, where Tezuka grew up, a resort town drenched in its own cloying brand of whimsy, for it sprang up around the all-woman Takarazuka Review Company, still popular after nearly a century of song-and-dance dramas where women play the parts of idealised men. As a child, Tezuka had often gone to the theatre with his mother, and the magic rubbed off on him. Even more magical, early sketchbooks show a passion for animals, beetles in particular, which he drew in minutely observed pen-strokes (later, he chose Osamushi--a ground beetle--as his pen name). But the most profound influence on the young Tezuka was the trauma of the American firebombing of Japanese cities towards the end of the second world war, along with the nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tezuka, sent to work for the imperial war effort in Osaka, witnessed the horror firsthand.

Mighty Atom embodies much of Japan's post-war trauma. Like many orphaned young Japanese, he had no parents, and his grief-stricken inventor created him in an attempt to bring a son back from the dead. To a Western mind, it seems strange that just six years after the Hiroshima bomb (which the Japanese soon referred to as "pika-don", or "flash-bang"), Tezuka should make his robot boy atomic. But the author seemed to be reflecting a wider Japanese sense that evil lies not in technology, but in the use to which it is put.

Seeing destruction, Mighty Atom becomes humanity's critic: he is, indeed, a robot with a soul, even offering his own life to save humanity. As Timothy Hornyak puts it in the definitive illustrated history of Japanese robots ("Loving the Machine", Kodansha, 2006): "He is a moral agent with a strong sense of justice that continually spurs him to leap to the defence of both humans and robots in quandaries that often involve high technology...he is a robot who experiences wrenching doubt and suffering."

"Mighty Atom" spawned a welter of other manga and anime series featuring robots as the central characters. Some had much more violence than Tezuka's creation--after all, many series had plastic toys to sell, and Japanese boys are no different in liking guns and swords. Even here, though, subtle differences abound. Since the late 1970s adolescents have grown up with the hugely popular "Gundam" anime and computer games. In these, protagonists are thrown, orphan-like, into harsh, unsentimental wars which they fight by inhabiting giant, two-legged "mobile suits". To a Western mind, perhaps, the emotion might be akin to being in command of a tank, having a grand time blasting away. But in "Wrong About Japan" (Vintage, 2004), by Peter Carey, the Australian writer and a Gundam enthusiast, says: "When you see these robots being knocked about and hurt, you'll notice the person operating the robot is also in pain...You must understand that these pilots are in the womb. They feel what the mother feels...This is quite the opposite of isolating yourself from the world...It is a safe place in which you can interact with the world."

To set a futuristic stamp on Mighty Atom, his creator gave the lad with twin horns of hair an outlandish birth date: April 7th 2003. When it came round, that day was marked with all sorts of hoopla--fireworks shows, conferences, exhibitions. At a fancy-dress parade in Takadanobaba, the Tokyo neighbourhood housing the laboratory from which Mighty Atom emerged, a lawyer in his 70s, dressed in the white smock of Professor Ochanomizu, the boy's protector, told a newspaper that the reason people loved the boy so much is that: "We Japanese want to live alongside robots."

Even if "partner robots", as their developers call them, have not yet moved wholesale into the home or office, ordinary people now believe such a move will take place. In a country whose population of 127m is forecast to fall by 30m over the next half-century, and already with the world's highest share (one-fifth) of elderly, partner robots, the idea goes, will soon be able to carry out household chores, guard homes and offices, care for the old and guide the lost.

Developers hope to sell robots that help old people to the lavatory and the like. Today, commercial products are mainly to provide companionship. The Snuggling Ifbot is a hit in nursing homes: it sings, plays quiz games and reminds residents to take their medicine. Paro the baby harp seal responds to stroking and attention, like a pet. Its developers, who call Paro a "mental commit" robot, ascribe therapeutic powers to it and say that it delays senescence.

Filipina nurses would love to care for the aged. But a citizenry that evinces deep discomfort when people from other countries are among it has set its heart against floods of foreigners: "R before I", robots before immigration. What is more, Japanese society exhibits still a nice degree of hierarchy and an excruciating desire not to put anyone out. Nursing staff are below patients, but it is hard to feel grand if your bottom is being cleaned.

Such coolness by the gate
as the tea-serving doll
brings another cup

The robot was a plump-faced boy in traditional kimono, about 15cm (six inches) high, and his party trick was to travel towards a guest, nodding and offering a cup of green tea on a tray before him. After the guest drains the cup and puts it back on the tray, the boy does an about-turn and shuffles back to where he started. It's a charming display, and both the haiku and the wind-up gadget, or karakuri, are two centuries old.

Perhaps the genius of karakuri was the late-19th-century inventor, Hisashige Tanaka. His masterpiece on display in Tokyo's National Science Museum is a jolly-faced archer who takes an arrow from his quiver, nocks it, leans forward to sight at the target and fires. Clockwork karakuri, which remain a thriving art today, could not have developed without absorbing European knowledge of clocks, but the new technology was soon given a very Japanese twist. It was, as Yoshitani explains, used to delight more than to be of use.

The world's most advanced humanoid today is Asimo, 120cm high, the product of 18 years of research and countless billions of yen spent by Honda, its maker. Every afternoon Asimo takes to the stage at Honda's gleaming Tokyo showroom: he should be on every tourist's itinerary. Asimo makes a rather shy entrance, treading gingerly as his servo-motors wheeze. But with his androgynous voice, his mobility--he can dance, run, dodge obstacles--and, yes, his ability to serve tea, this diminutive thing in his space suit has a capacity to delight. Asimo has rung the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, and laid flowers at the foot of Capek's bust in Prague.

The dream that Honda promotes is for Asimo to dwell at home, a loved and useful member of the family. Yet for all his sophistication, Asimo shows how far there is still to go before robots can really be like people and live with them. His gait leaves him bent-kneed and flat-footed and his actions must still be programmed. As his chief engineer, Satoshi Shigemi, explains, Asimo is not yet able to make his own decisions, struggling to assess information and act on it.

Indeed, says Tokyo University's Tomomasa Sato, home environments are far too complex, varied and dynamic for human-type robots physically to master. To take one example: while Asimo identifies his teacups by a sticker on them, telling a full cup from an empty one is immensely hard. Not only must a robot's camera-eyes differentiate tea in the cup from the cup itself, but also the reflection of the room on the surface of the tea. Our brains compute these visual subtleties in an instant; robots struggle.

Developing robots to replicate the processes of human thought that lead to action, then, raises near-insurmountable challenges. Sato takes a counter-intuitive approach. Instead of developing robots for rooms, why not make the room itself a robot, as it were, festooning it with cameras and sensors on ceiling, floor and bed? That would have its uses in hospital, for instance, where a patient's sleeping patterns could be monitored, or where he could point at, say, a glass, and a humanoid (essentially the robot room's dumb slave) could be sent to bring it to the bed.

But the most radical ideas--and robots--are being developed under the direction of Hiroshi Ishiguro, a thatch-haired professor at Osaka University, in partnership with ATR labs. For a robot to begin to approach human levels of perception, thought process and action, he argues, an impossibly rich sensory environment and heavy computational power would be needed, and he is not going to live long enough to see it. Instead, Ishiguro and colleagues are attempting to replicate human appearance. Asimo with his space suit, his hard plastic exterior and his mechanical movements is not meant to fool anyone by his appearance. But Ishiguro wants to build robots that look and move like humans--androids, in other words. He has called forth a new discipline: android science.

At ATR, I had been led to believe I would be introduced to Ishiguro that afternoon. I was, but only in a sense. When I was ushered into the room, the professor motioned me to a chair, his hands playing nervously, his shoulders rising with each breath. "Ask me anything you like," he said, fixing me with an intent look, before staring at the floor despondently when I began to chuckle. "How many actuators do you have?" I said. "I have 50 pneumatic actuators in my upper body, including 17 in my head, five of which I use to move my lips for speech, and four activitators to make my shoulder move in a natural fashion." "Do you believe in God?" "Um, er...,": Ishiguro put his finger to his face in embarrassment. "Good question. Maybe you should ask the professor that one?"

The "professor" was being operated in a nearby room by a young research assistant. I met the real Ishiguro the next day. He argued that Japan's easy acceptance of robots had religious roots. In both Buddhism and Shintoism, the soul is everywhere and "just as we don't distinguish between humans and rocks, so we don't distinguish between humans and robots." By contrast, Honda had sought the Vatican's advice ten years ago before introducing Asimo's forerunner to Europe.

Ishiguro explained that since people anthropomorphise the object they are communicating with, then for robots to communicate convincingly, they must look and act as nearly lifelike as possible. For too long, robots had been in the hands of industrial developers who didn't think of making robots truly lifelike. Much more important than a robot thinking like a human--impossible anyway--was that it should appear like one.

Ishiguro started out four years back by attempting a replica of his seven-year-old daughter. That one had a mere eight actuators (in effect, air-operated muscles) in her face, while early efforts rendered the silicone skin pallid and bloated. His daughter, used to playing with clunky robots, was introduced to her likeness. Appalled, she burst into tears, swearing never to come to her father's lab again.

It was an example of the "uncanny valley": the more a robot resembles a human, the more people relate to it in more nearly human terms. But there comes a point at which the likeness repels, probably because it seems ghoulish or deathlike. That is the uncanny valley. The android of the daughter had fallen into the valley. The newer one of her father had climbed out on the other side, thanks to better skin and more actuators. Even so, the world's most lifelike android cannot deceive at ten metres for more than a few seconds. Now Ishiguro's team are developing a robot with more, smaller actuators, highly sensitive skin sensors (in the form of stretchable circuit boards) and vocal chords, to see if it can learn movements and sounds from external stimuli--just like a child.

"By developing androids," said Ishiguro, "we're discovering humans' complexity." People may be fooled for a few seconds by a good android, but hoping to fool them for one or two hours is pure fancy. Prodigious quantities of sensors, actuators and computing powers would be required. This, said Ishiguro, "is the bottleneck."

Yet even if it did not deceive, Ishiguro's android did not create great discomfort. After a few minutes, I found myself engaging with his eyes as we spoke, leaning forward to ask a question, treating him pretty much as an extension of his operator. That is the kind of purpose Ishiguro has in mind for androids: teleoperation, gets around the bottleneck. It would save him a lot of bother, he says, if his android delivered lectures to his students while he was somewhere else and even doing something else--though he admits that Americans or Europeans always lobbing questions would be more of a challenge than his docile Japanese students. He also thinks androids raise all sorts of philosophical questions to do with ego, identity and authority. Ishiguro told me of watching a video of an attractive woman talking to his android twin. Who was she flirting with: him, the robot or its operator? The sexual frisson he says he felt seemed to supply one answer.

If that was the kind of experiment robot scientists indulged in, I wanted in myself. So after this journey, could I still say I had kept my lifelong indifference to robots? On leaving Ishiguro's effigy, I felt myself bending forward into an involuntary bow.

(Dominic Ziegler is Tokyo bureau chief of The Economist)

Photographs by Geoff Johnson, Japan, January 2008