Robots feel rage too

Robot makers these days are all focused on creating immortal info machines that are sleek and graceful, so God bless the Tokyo University of Science‘s soft nostalgia for 1990s-style clunkers with “skin” who looked “real,” because it begot SAYA the helpful receptionist here, aka an animatronic Mike Myers. Perhaps her finished design was inevitable considering development started in 1993 and she was done only recently. Her looks and styling were created by a guy who makes a living as a love doll creator. (We got a peek at SAYA 2.0, who was made to look like her engineer’s ex-girlfriend, which is actually spookier than what she looks like now.) With a vocabulary of 300 words that can be configured into 700 phrases, she talks from speakers in her tits. But don’t say anything about it–or anything rude, for that matter–or she’ll curl up her face like a pitbull and tell you off. Our friend Maria Ahlgren discovered this when she visited SAYA at her home in Japan.

SAYA’s creator, Dr. Hiroshi Kobayashi, has bad news: no living man of today will ever meet a communicative robot. Autonomous AI does not exist today, he claims–all robots need pre-programming, and combining the functions of industrial robots with human-like IQ is tricky. Even for a guy like him, who has on his resume not only SAYA but a walking device for people who have lost all motor functions. He’s also the man who created the famed “muscle suit” that can turn the teeniest shrimp into He-man. So for now if we want to talk to a robot we’re basically stuck with talking to the mind of its creator.

To find out more about it I would say something in Japanese to Saya, and then she’d respond, making sweet little sounds and wrinkling her nose when appropriate.

Here is SAYA in neutral position. Very life-like, not scary at all.

This is happy SAYA.
I told her she was cute. “Thank you!” she responded with a giggle. So far this robot was doing nothing to dispel Japanese woman stereotypes.

This is sad SAYA.

I decided see what the robot engineers knew about the female psyche, and told her she looked unpleasant. “Don’t say such things,” she responded, with sounds of sobbing.

This is Surprised SAYA.

I told her to be startled and she responded, “I’m shocked!”

This is disgusted SAYA.

Eliciting this expression required putting something icky in front of her. Not that she notices any difference, but just for visual impact. I told her to touch this (use your imagination, genius), and she squealed, “Disgusting!”

This is angry SAYA.
At this point things were getting heated, and she actually got pretty fierce when I called her an idiot. When she’s pissed she flashes her teeth, her tummy sounds like a thunderstorm, and her eyes get a fanatic glow. “I am not an idiot,” she responded, “OK!”

This is frightened SAYA.

I told her she was going to get bird flu. “I’m getting scared,” she whimpered.

So there you have it. In ten minutes her mood swung from happy to sad, polite to irritable, giggly to moody. She was actually quite a handful. These creators sure do understand women!

(Photos by Melanie Magassa)