My Robot Overlords Are Cuter Than Yours
By:
April 14, 2009
CB2 has one job: to win your heart. With its silicone skin, its bark-like cooing calls, and its lurching, needy gestures, the robot stimulates people to reach out in caring supplication, just as evolution has conditioned us to do with infants.
The brainchild of Osaka University’s Hiroshi Ishiguro (the genius behind the uncanny/sexy fembot Actroid), CB2 appeared in 2007. Since then, Ishiguro and colleagues have been developing its software to respond to social cues with greater sophistication.
The prospect of ever-more-invincible warbots has lately been the subject of intense coverage, largely thanks to P. W. Singer’s scary/fascinating book Wired for War. But as we’ve discussed elsewhere, it’s likely that cute robots, not implacable Decepticons, one day will be our overlords. Like the designers of cartoon characters, roboticists have discovered that they can win our hearts by emulating infant humans. CB2 (pronounced “see bee squared”) reminds us that babies are not only sweet but also, well, creepy; it’s their palsied defenselessness as much as their cute features that compel us to serve their needs. Although the video below appeared at the time of CB2’s initial release, it remains the best visual demonstration of the robot’s uncanny appeal.
Ishiguro is hardly the only person to have recognized the power of robot powerlessness. Kacie Kinzer, a student in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has created a series of rudimentary cardboard-bodied “robots”— in reality simple, self-propelled toys — which she outfits with little flags pleading for assistance. As her Tweenbots convince passers-by to aid them on their journeys across Washington Square Park, they demonstrate that our own conscience is an important feature in any robot’s “software.” Once it has engaged our emotions, even a cardboard-clad plaything can compel us to do its bidding.
Of course, not only defenseless infants provoke our sympathy. As Japanese performance artist Momoyo Torimitsu demonstrates in the clip below, even a pathetic robot salaryman can provoke strong reactions in passers-by: the Uncanny Valley meets the Bystander Effect.
Why do the uncanny and the infantile seem so closely linked in our experience of robots? The uncanny robot is an image of the thingness of oneself — self sans self-control. The infant’s lack of self-control is likewise a reminder of limits — a reminder moreover that we emerge out of limits. There is about them both the whiff of our abjection.