A visit to the human factory

Will Jackson, CEO of robotics company Engineered Arts, says he isn’t sure what’s worse: the angry emails that accuse him of building machines that will one day overthrow humanity or the speculative ones enquiring if the sender can fuck the robots.

“Everybody wants to see a humanoid robot,” Jackson says. “They love to imagine all these things that are going to happen. Part of what we do is fulfilling that desire.” (Though not, he is careful to stress, the sex-robot stuff.)

Footage of Engineered Arts’ most recent creation, a gray-skinned bot named Ameca, went viral last December with clips showing an android with an exposed metal torso and eerily realistic facial expressions interacting with researchers. (“Android” being the correct term for a human-shaped robot, from the ancient Greek andro for “man” and eides for “form.”)

In one video, Ameca frowns as an off-screen employee reaches out to touch its nose before smoothly reaching up to stop his arm in a whir of electric motors. It’s an uncanny moment that sets off alarm bells for the viewer: the shock is that a robot would want to establish this boundary between it and us — a desire that is, ironically, very human.

“Got just a tad scared when it raised its hand to his arm. Thought it was just gonna snap it.” Says another, “I know this is scary, but I love this and I want more.”

It’s these emotions — curiosity, fear, excitement — that are Engineered Arts’ stock-in-trade. The company makes its money selling its robots for entertainment and education. They’re used by academics for research; by marketing teams for publicity stunts; and placed in museums, airports, and malls to welcome visitors. “Anywhere you’ve got a big crowd of people to interact with,” says Jackson.

The machines can run on autopilot, reacting to passersby with preset banter. Or they can be controlled remotely, with unseen handlers responding to queries from the crowd as in this video filmed at CES. In the near future, though, Engineered Arts wants to equip its robots with more sophisticated chatbot software that would let them respond fluidly to queries without any human guidance.

More than entertainers, though, these robots are heralds of the future. As technology improves and androids become more realistic, the question of how we relate to such machines is going to become more pressing. Are fucking and fighting the only two responses we can imagine?

Humanity’s interest in androids seems like a modern obsession, but this is far from the truth. We’ve been dreaming of artificial humans for thousands of years — from the singing, gold-forged Celedones of ancient Greek myth to the golem of Jewish folklore, molded from clay and animated by sacred words. The term “robot,” by comparison, is a more recent coinage, first appearing in 1920 in the play RUR, or Rossum’s Universal…