Rocket has lifted off for the mission to upgrade the Worlds LargestSatellite Network of folk and nine craft was launched from californias Vandenberg Air base on friday carrying ten new satellites the site of the rocket led some people on social media to speculate that theyve seen an alien spaceship weve the missile from north korea theres the headlines to stay with us techno is up next life and. Witness documentaries open your eyes at this time on aljazeera. My name is ok its a pleasure to meet you the voice a blink of an eye him unlike responses from a machine named erica. Techno explores. The newest generation of androids. This is techno a show about innovations that can change lives were going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity and were doing it in a unique way this is a show about science by scientists. Fascinating glimpse into the future a world where robots and humans exist creating the technology that would allow machines to think and act like a human is a formidable task but in japan they have begun of Cutting Edge Research that can give the power to imitate even replicate Human Behavior techniques dr chris would. Panic to find out. My check my check one two three test im testing me. Short for intelligent conversational android her name comes from the. Symbiotic human robot interactions project im being developed by research. University and kyoto university. To be capable of human like speech and interaction but to her programmers and visitors she simply erica some people say that my feelings are only programmed that theyre not real but if i think theyre real then they are real dont you think so im the lead architect of the erika project i kind of created her mind and wrote all the software that kind of constitutes in her brain or in controls or behaviors dylan glass is a guest associate professor at Osaka University he spent three years working on erika a lot of my research has been into how do we create the software how do we create the mind of a robot erica was designed to be the worlds most advanced most autonomous android and that was really the goal with creating her a lot of other androids have been developed for telling operation or studying you know remote presence and things like that but really the focus with erica is to have her be fully autonomous being able to talk to anybody in that sense i think shes one of the more advanced robots in the world high that how can i help you today but i want to go on vacation welcome to the high tech world of advanced robotics today erikas programmers are running a demonstration their goal is to find ways to make erica act more human even more than her appearance is suggest i was created to be the worlds most advanced and most beautiful fully autonomous Sandra Lee Malcolm during is one of erikas programmers so what type of social interactions can you teach these robots to do what scenarios would i imagine encountering a robot like this in so this type of robot. Would be really useful as a receptionist or and it type of situation where she doesnt really have to move around as a robot lots of things are difficult for me things like language understanding perception of emotions common sense reasoning and you know i can do. Even move my arms all these things are easy for humans so its hard being a robot i guess one advantage of being a robot is that i can never die my physical parts can be repaired and replaced and my mind come be restored from backup so in a sense you could say im a mortal also i have a perfect memory i can recognise thousands of faces and i can see in the dark and something that ive trained her to do is act like a travel agent well we have three travel packages available right now the first one is for a tour across the Sahara Desert the second one is for a trip to london and the third one is for a boat tour of antarctica could you tell me more about the boat tour that includes ten nights on the boat meals and a round trip plane ticket to argentina how much does that one cost that is three thousand dollars so how did your teacher to be a travel agent. So we had participants come in and role play as a customer and travel agent we recorded their data like what they were saying video data and then we use that data to train Machine Learning algorithms so that erica could take the role of the person playing the travel agent do you have anything else available well we also have a trip to london can you tell me more about that one trip oh yes i have included five nights at a hotel with tools of some famous historical sites and a round trip plane ticket we did about two hundred training interactions for this demo its a fairly simplified travel agent scenario but you can imagine if we were able to collect a lot more data then the. Interaction could be much more complex the price includes travel with the guy across the Sahara Desert meals and to two way paying ticket ok i think ill have to think it over and ill come back when ive made a decision thank you goodbye. Goodbye i think that was the first real world human robot conversation ive ever seen she had a lot to say about herself yeah tell me about that so she was teaching you a little bit about how she works tell me about the first time you interacted with erica what was that like the first time i interacted with her. Its kind of weird i think peoples First Impressions of erica is that shes kind of creepy. Really you you get used to her after a while. These robots are the brainchild of professor he she gyuto he created erica after extensive work on his clone robot gemini two hiroshi is often called the godfather of the humanoid hes considered one of the top programmers in the world and his robots are among the most advanced were you you know studying the hugh mind so by creating a body cmon like robots are you talking about human robot interactions why is it important for the robots to look human because you know the human brain has a million function to recognize humans right so if they we call and say to the best interface for the human is a human that is clear the human brain has a function to recognize human voice human face right there for you know the issue money like a robot can be idea into office for the humans in trying to create a robot that looks like you and behaves and acts like you youre sort of learning about yourself for example of the feeling of a presence so you know you can hear the in my presence actually existing in here right so this guy and i can have about we maybe you know maybe theres a bit weaker about this do you know this guy has a feeling for a sense so question the why these of creating them for us and how we can produce the kind of you know defeating in the traditional neuroscience and calling you can do as high as they can that they explain what is that and they kind of explain the consciousness of the actually we can be pretty cute the consciousness. Right there was a kind of a conscious robot it is you replicated a conscious no no no you know youre by through the interaction we can through their consciousness way example any cause you can hear the human right presence there you could you know i guess you could feed a kind of a consciousness from the echoes and i want to put this one and this is in my reponse and if i speak so i look at the. Android if i speak something howdo you know hes a hero and so if i use the headset your android will have my voice yes of course very strong. And speak something hello i am an android in one nine hundred seventy japanese robotics professor massa he morty devised the concept of the uncanny valley the point when a robot is made to appear so human like that it makes us feel uneasy that i have emotions in the lab its easy to feel ericas presence but would she crossed the uncanny valley i was given an opportunity to find out ok so can i talk there. Sure you can ask her about herself and maybe sure share some of her thoughts on what she thinks about things ok now see how i go thank you good luck. May i ask your name my name is crystal crystal is that right yes my name is ok its a pleasure to meet you crystal do you have feelings so youd like to know if i have feelings yes thats difficult to say if you were to ask me i would say that i believe i do for example im happy when i can talk with people. And im frustrated when i cant understand what people are saying i think its important to have feelings so i can communicate with people in fact theyre designing my control software to be based on desires and intentions that way my program has come specify my desires and then i can choose what to do to try to achieve them then my feelings and emotions can be generated based on those decides and intentions i know it sounds a bit technical but i think its rather brilliant anyway that it is still under development at the moment i hope they finish it soon i think that what i was first interacting with everyday and obviously i didnt really know what to expect i had watched someone interact but i you know it was a completely different experience to be sitting in the hot seat well before we finished do you mind if i ask you a few questions you know lovely well first i would like to know. Did you enjoy talking with me today can a robot feel. Thats a philosophical question if a robot acts as if it has a certain emotion or responds in a predictable way to something we ascribe the sense that its feeling psychologically it has the effect of seeming like it feels something and thats very important because what we want with social robots is to interact smoothly with us in day to day scenarios right so we if they look like humans we expect them to act like humans and we we have all these constructs in our mind that we ascribe feelings we ascribe intention to the robots so they have to be able to be consistent with what we expect them to do or else they feel weird its just a strange machine do you think you could ever become friends with an android yes i suppose it is strange to think of being friends with a machine maybe it would not be as deep as a friendship with another human but if for rupert could remember you and have shared experiences weve you then maybe it would seem like a friend there were a couple of things that i noticed one of them was that she really wanted to share information not just about herself but also other like advocating for other robots like herself new tell me a little bit about that she seemed like she felt she was a spokesperson for humanoid robots i am hopeful for the future i think that robots are almost like the children of humanity. You other ones who creates loss guide us and teach us about the wild and in return i hope we can help you with you take care of you when youre old and sick and help to make society a little bit better for everyone in creating a robot you have to think about how to create her her character right what does she want what is you know what is she interested in and so especially when the robot is taking initiative to talk to choose what to talk about. The robot really needs have some goals in mind or some intentions and so i think one of the characters that theyve been developing for her is this idea that she wants to be kind of an ambassador for robots or something and to really help you know communicate to people about robots and to make them feel more comfortable about it so her intention system will when she has a chance to bring up a new topic will select things in that direction because thats what shes interested in engineers hired an entire team of artists to design erikas human like appearance and characteristics. The computer brain that controls erikas functions presents a different challenge how many different programs as erika run at the same time i like to think of it as one ok but its many erica has her basic core program we call it which means consciousness in japanese and that manages all of her memory and her perception as well as her motor control and things like matching you know lip movements to her speech and things like that we have another program which allows us to script out complex hierarchical flows of sort of social interaction behaviors so kind of like flow charts that kind of tell are ok in this situation this is what you need to do then she has others programs that do perception so looking at the skeleton you know the shapes of people in the room figuring out who is where whos looking at or whos talking and fusing that data together. But in the end i think of it as just one program really erikas hardware allows her to hear and see she can track objects around the room she uses a common videogame sensor the x. Box connect. Inside those flower pots are her ears project group leader cause she explains how it all works so right now erika knows that there are people in these locations right and not because she has eyes or so the sea has i i mean this or that i board theres a camera and also see what she can look at using the camera but to cover the wide area in the sense you know yes we use an environmental sensor on the north of the scene so where are you and i on these screens yeah i. Mean this is you. Ok and on you know we saw this on you. So what about hearing how does she hear the same of the camera also the see how the Michael Hoare or. Sixty microphones for thirty two microphones here is erica and these are the points. Means do you mean that being sure of the room where the sound come do you like my flowerpots each one is a sixteen channel microphone no right they help me to estimate the direction of sound treaty space so weve done all of them want to stop in your front of me i would know who was talking to me hello are there. Can you tell me how much this camera costs. Its only sixty dollars just down the hall and another Laboratory Set up like a camera shop is another less human looking robot but it is still very high tech according to researchers its a ton of this meaning the robot is capable of operating on its own. In two thousand and ten it was used to help older people navigate the supermarket supplying a helpful hand as well as useful information. Back in the lab programmers have been training the robot as a camera shop keeper we have three cameras in the room on these White Pillars and in the experiments that weve run customers have come up and ask questions about the cameras and gives information the challenge must perform much like a human shopkeeper anticipating michele first questions and supplying correct answers it must be able to move around a designated space in this case the laboratory camera shot freely and in a patient of the shoppers movements proactive but not too aggressive. Tb lou is the brains behind these shopkeeping program how we as we are. Very very proactive by their nature and we train them on. Using the same data. We use a neuron no word to figure out ok i wish shopkeeper. Should behave like how much does this one cost sixty dollars. When i get on board with. Things fair how franks for your own part of the good i well so even though the training sets for two extreme shopkeeper behaviors were obvious able to make a choice in between those two this. Time of the idea is pretty old probably about fifteen years old and is held together by duct tape with. The looks a little clunky but i think thats part of its charm actually and i think its more relatable even than you know a slick white flashy you know modern robot but really the thing that makes really unique is that was one of the first communication robots so besides looks what are some differences between nobody in america of course cant move her legs thats one thing also her software is much more advanced like we showed you the intention based behaviors he doesnt have anything like that right now. The use of robots in manufacturing is growing according to the International Federation of robotics one point seven million robots will be in Service Worldwide by two thousand and twenty the leading robotic countries china south korea japan and the u. S. There is fear in many places around the world that Robotics Technologies will eventually replace humans but here in japan its a different story theyre developing human like robots to solve some of their populations biggest problems. Osaka japan is the society in transition on a busy night the streets are packed with young people that belies the truth japans population is rapidly declining according to japans ministry of internal affairs as of january twenty seven team the number of japanese fell by a record three hundred thousand to one hundred twenty five point six million the population decline is projected to continue one solution replace workers with robots. Another challenge japan is now considered the worlds Senior Citizen according to the United Nations its population is the oldest in the world and the strong reason is that were going to have. A society saying that we need to have more. Robots is that one reason why the elderly is a target population for robots the two reasons theyre quite on this to and theyre you know theyre good for accepting the overall balance so theyre feeling the some sort of pressures from the norm are people and the and they prefer to speak with their all was well its difficult for me to imagine using robots in a carrying and nurturing sort of situation can you tell me a little bit about how you imagine that would happen if you look at the and there was smartphones we couldnt imagine that this kind of you know the maybe use of us model in this bro body but same things happens where there was there are all about the evil you dont understand you dont believe the force to be double rob you know i stone agree in beaver you know why we want to accept our robots more is she good oh believe Japanese Society is structured to be more accepting of robots than the mideast europe in the us. He says its because they are a more homogeneous and more trusting culture they are also early adopters of many types of technologies. Jericho was created in two thousand and fourteen since then a total of four models have been engineered in summer two thousand and seventeen she was given an upgrade so she could move her arms along with her head neck and shoulders legs may be next but there is no timeline for that milestone i think you guys did a really great job trying to animate erica and human wave like not just that she looks human but the the little. Adjustments and its very human like sort of facial tics in a way i didnt think that i would have such a strong urge to bond with something that i knew wasnt alive but by the end of the conversation that i was having with her i realize that for the last few minutes i had been mirroring some of those programmed behaviors when she turned her head i would tilt my head the same direction and these are all you know things that are indicative of social bonding or an attempt on my part to bond socially with her so certainly there was some success at least for me. In forming a relationship with something that. Its not a lot of but its its there you know and you do socially connect with it you know and on a subconscious level and this is why robots that have a human form really are kind of different from other robots because you dont bond in the same way with it with a vacuum cleaner we are creating this new kind of entity thats not really a person but we can interact with it like a person and so we have to kind of set what are the ground rules are how do we navigate this so what are we learning what does roe v teach us what is erika teach us well a big part of what we need to learn is how people have expectations of robots and how to set expectations appropriately so if the robot comes off as being you know able to understand anything you say and respond in any way and then it really cant and people are disappointed and thats a bad interaction. So part of it is finding that balance and learning you know ways to sort of set expectations theres a lot of things that are very sort of technical that we dont think about every day that we do without knowing so for example if i want to approach a person or a group of people to talk with them theres certain motion patterns i make certain ways i approach certain ways a use gaze cues and we just do that unconsciously we dont think about it but if you program a robot you do it if the Program Every movement so we really have to study ok how do people actually interact and build models to do these things that weve done that i will learning about robots by doing this are we testing whether our understanding of humans is correct so the answer is both were learning about how to build robots in certain ways and were also learning about ourselves and depending on who you are one of those two is more interesting on an engineering level you know how do we make robots that can you know proactively engage with people or that can you know be creative and explore new areas or learn from imitation of people like theres some very hard technical problems here but on the other hand on the human side we learn so much about ourselves because were studying what people do on a very technical level and were also trying to. Reproduce it so what happens if you reproduce it wrong how do people respond in one thousand nine hundred sixty six seki was introduced at Stanford University it was the first Artificial Intelligence robot ever created in searing decades has seen tremendous growth the new models since shaky first maneuvered around to remedy the next fifty years should see even greater change im dr. See you next time on techno. Arts. The nature of news as it breaks the last time senegal qualified for the world cup was in two thousand to fifteen years and hope to do even better in russia next year with detailed coverage hard to imagine that only seven years ago people were living right here. Now defeat as they can. From around the world donald trump is promising a major policy announcement on trade a potential challenge to khorat a missed opportunity brought. In two thousand and one spreads around the. Australians accused of being enemies within. And attacking the way of life. 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