jeudi 28 septembre 2017

Decidedly Human

Today's tabloids bring us a story about a supposed robot that is so lifelike it has "divided the internet" with controversy. It was reported in a handful of rags including the Daily Mail, Yahoo7 News, and the Mirror.

Almost forty years ago I took a trip to Disneyland in California and visited the "Hall of Presidents." It was really cool to see what the Disney Imagineers could create with a handful of actuators. Even though the robots were sculpted, painted and programmed to be as lifelike as possible, they never crossed the threshold of ultimate realism. They weren't able to fool me into believing they were real human beings. At face value, they were never anything more than mechanical robots.

Today's automatons and robots aren't much better, they just have more actuators. But they always strike me as being immediately mechanical. I've never found myself doing a double take and wondering whether a robot was so good that it made me believe it was human.

After watching the videos linked in today's stories, I knew immediately that the "robot" presented was not a robot but was a real person. Are people really so gullible as to believe this is a robot or are the rags so bad at reporting and so uncaring about the truth that they will report anything to stir interest and attempt to increase readership? I guess that was a rhetorical question.

Look at the videos. Are you fooled?


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2hARFW2

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