His name is Sota. She is less than half a meter tall and her bulging eyes exude, at first glance, a lot of sympathy. She is the avatar presented yesterday – she has come to Barcelona from Japan to stay – at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) with a luxury guest.
Hiroshi Ishiguro, considered one of the world's top hundred geniuses in research in the field of robotics, is behind this project and was the master of ceremonies.
This Japanese android creator is known for his realistic human replicas and also for manufacturing, years ago, a clone robot. A humanoid pinned to him. “I hope one day he works for me,” Hiroshi usually says when asked about his other self of wires and silicone.
Sota, the avatar adopted by the UPC, is more aseptic and has its own personality. He is a teleoperated robot – behind his answers there is a person who verbalizes them – and during the next few days he will be one more, among the students of that university.
The project, pioneering in a university center in Spain, navigates between technology and sociology, points out Alberto Sanfeliu, researcher at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI) and the only international expert who works with the team of Japanese researchers led by Hiroshi Ishiguro.
Sota's mission is to study the students' reaction to his presence, questions and answers. Investigate how humans interact with this machine. It is an experience that is already being done in Japan in shopping centers or other public places.
For Sanfeliu and Hiroshi, the human response to these avatars is crucial at this time "to know what type of humanoid fits best in different societies." In the era of deployment of these robots, it is assumed that each country will have its preferred models. And each society will interact with these machines in its own way.
What it is about is achieving maximum complicity between avatars and humans to get the most out of these robots, which can help people a lot, as was repeated yesterday in Sato's presentation at the UPC.
The robotics industry is at its peak. The improvement of these machines, increasingly more humanized, forces an ethical debate about the consequences that this reality can have among people.
Norihiro Hagita, researcher at Osaka University and director of one of the nine axes of the Moonshot program, in which Sota's project (Avatar Symbiotic Society) is framed, predicts that in 2050 “avatars will coexist completely normally with humans.” ”. And he argues that these machines will become essential in a world that is “increasingly older and with less human labor.”
But no matter how real these humanoids are, which they will be, Hiroshi emphasizes, for those most fearful of this technology, that it will not be necessary to marry these machines, but he does assume that complicity with them will be total. In Japan, when they turn off, they already have their own cemeteries.
