Imagine a future with humanoid robots that look like us, talk like us, and do all of the boring, dirty, or dangerous jobs that you don’t want to do.

 You won’t need to stretch your imagination muscles too hard since it’s a bit of a sci-fi staple. You’ll find androids are plenty in Star Trek and Blade Runner, in the Western world and IRobot and chappie and countless more, but there is a real science to recommend androids over other types of robots.

 When doing uniquely human tasks, involving using human tools and navigating human dwellings. It helps a lot to be able to move in ways that are similar to us. And while people divide opinion on whether would they welcome a humanoid robots into their homes. A study has found that older people at least would prefer to have their personal care overseen by an automaton with a familiar face.

 Ultimately, though, building a machine that looks like a person is fraught with challenges both physical and emotional.

 There is a lot going on in Android research all over the world right now, with tons of different real-world permutations of humanoid robots. And one of them is Sophia, the latest of Hanson’s robotics humanoid creations.




  Sophia was designed by David Hanson, who’s got a reputation for building incredibly life-like robots. His previous creations have included an Android that looks like Albert Einstein, and another that resembled the classic sci-fi author Philip K. Dick.

 But Sophia is the most advanced yet. She’s shaped after Audrey Hepburn and she’s set up with AI that facilitates her to interact with the world around her. Sophia seems to have a clear the idea of her purpose in life, or at least her creators do, but how close is she to realizing that purpose. One of the things that set her apart from other humanoid robots around at the moment is her remarkably expressive face. Her skin is made of a special kind of material called facial rubber or frubber for sure, which can stretch, it can wrinkle, it can move in a way that’s pretty similar to our own skin. Motors and actuators beneath the froth can change its position, just like the muscles beneath our skin move our other surfaces around. By coordinating those movements, she’s able to recreate some very familiar facial expressions, 

HAPPINESS,



SADNESS,



FEAR,



DISGUST,



and even BORED.




It’s hard to remind yourself that when Sophia pulls these faces, she’s nothing more than a bunch of gears and motors beneath that faux fleshy face, but there’s no real feeling behind the mask, but that’s the incredible power of facial expressions.

Studies have found that nonverbal communication like body language and gestures and facial expressions makes up between 50 to 70% of communication between humans. So, if our robotic assistance hopes to succeed in forming meaningful relationships with us humans, they really to master this whole facial expression thing. Sophia says to herself “humans can really feel the emotions behind the facial expressions, I figure out I’m starting to master the facial expressions but still learning the emotions behind them”.

As it turns out, simply having the machinery to pull the right faces is only half of the battle. As humans, we are so sensitive to the emotional clues from someone’s face that we can’t help but read deep meaning into the timing and intensity of any expressions that cross. It if those expressions don’t match our expectations, it can result in miscommunication at best and a nasty feeling of revulsion at worst.

One of the things that all human replicas face whether they’re robotic or CGI or just mannequins is known as the uncanny valley. The term was first coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori back in the 1970s. They describe the discomfort and distrust that many of us feel when seeing a replica that is almost but not quite human. And the effect is particularly pronounced in moving robots: since the motions to replicate speech and basic facial expressions, it can be at first compelling and then suddenly when they’re not quite right profoundly disturbing.

I should say that there’s still a lot of deliberation about whether the uncanny valley exists at all since people’s opinions of human replicas can vary massively but it’s difficult to define exactly when a face crosses over from cute to eerie, but if Hanson robotics hope that Sophia with her realistically fleshy face and her realistically broad range of emotions can bridge the uncanny valley and take steps down the road of meaningful human-robot interactions. Have they managed it? Well, here’s what Michael Mosley had to say after his interview with Sofia “I think the thing which is very striking about the sphere is obviously, she answers questions but also she doesn’t see the separation of human faces as well sometimes appropriately sometimes less appropriately, but it’s very, very disconcerting talking to her and it is this range of expressions which really fools you at moments into thinking you’re actually talking to another human yeah that’s right well possibly my dog she doesn’t remind me of my dog that”

So, not quite seamless just yet, but with interactions at kinder communicating with your dog to be something right. Let’s hope that Sophia can do it more than dig the garden and shred the sofa.

Plus, is it really a good idea to create a perfect humanoid robot indistinguishable from the real thing? I mean they managed it in Blade Runner look how that turned out we’ve all come to be thankful for that flashing snow cap after all.

Some of us think that robots can kill us all and take our planet, like Elon musk trying to stop the robotic manufacturing companies from making robots. But we are far from that kind of destruction, till then humans will able to create a chip that allows humans to download new skills and stop robots to take over the planet, I hope so.

I am dying to know what you think of Sophia. So, get those comments coming in below