AI 165 AI Inventor creates his own robotic wife and he is pleased because she has 13,000 dialogue sentences and can feel pain!

Le Trung , an inventor in Canada has created his very own fembot called Aiko.
The living doll's skin has been created out of silicone and, according to its creator, "is the first android to mimic pain, and reacts to it."
Trung has created the 'pain' technology to aid others, explaining: "this technology can be beneficial for people born with or who have undergone amputations. This is the first step toward a life-like mechanical limb that has the ability to feel physical sensation."

To make the robot more lifelike, Trung has created something called Biometric Robot Artificial Intelligence Neural System (aka BRAINS) software, which means Aiko has the ability to talk and interact with humans, and houses a database of over 13,000 sentences.

The robot is so advanced that it can analyse the weather and if you are about to go outside, Aiko will tell you to bring an umbrella if it is going to rain or wear warmer clothes if it is windy.

AI 164 Study states that by 2020 social robots will be common place in our society with personalized interactions with humans

Spanish researchers have carried out a study looking into the potential future impact of robots on society.

Their conclusions show that the enormous automation capacity of robots and their ability to interact with humans will cause a technological imbalance over the next 12 years between those who have them and those who do not.


“Just as we depend upon mobile phones and cars in our daily lives today, the next 15 years will see mass hybridisation between humans and robots,” predicts Antonio López Peláez, a professor of sociology at Spain’s National Distance Learning University, UNED, and co-author of the study on the future social impact of robots, jointly carried out with the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies.

International experts working on inventing and adapting cutting edge robots for practical use were interviewed during the study, in order to find out by when we will be regularly using the models they are currently designing.

All agreed on 2020 as a technological inflection point, because by then robots “will be able to see, act, speak, manage natural language and have intelligence, and our relationship with them will have become more constant and commonplace”, said López Peláez.

This will follow a revolution in robotics after which they will no longer be sophisticated machines, but tools to be used on a daily basis, helping us with a large number of work and social activities.


The most striking feature of this technological revolution are social robots, machines with artificial intelligence, and with which we will have emotional and personalised interactions.

“A robot might be a more effective partner and a better person than the humans we actually have in our immediate lives: just as you can see dog owners talking to their pets today, soon we will be talking to robots,” says López Peláez

AI 99 The year 2029 is when AI Agents will act like humans

A panel of futurists across a number of disciplines have picked 2029 as the year when ai agents finally get up to human speed.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent, spokesman Ray Kurzweil told the BBC Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering.

The picture shows an Intelligent female" android from Tokyo’s robotdreams.com.

AI 11: Consumer robots learn to use their hands

Consumer robots can now use AI to learn how to use objects that the robot has not encountered before. This learning capability is being pioneered by the University of Massachusetts Amherst using a robot called UMass Mobile Manipulator or UMan.

UMan experiments with objects and once it identifies an object's moving parts it then conducts any number of experiments to learn the optimum ways of using it to perform tasks.

"You can imagine a baby playing with a toy and pulling the different parts and seeing what moves how," says lead author and graduate student Dov Katz, who did the work with Oliver Brock, a professor of computer science.

"One of the challenges in robotics is having [a robot] act intelligently, even when it doesn't know the shape of the object," says Andrew Ng, a computer scientist at Stanford University who works on robotic gripping.

"I think their work is an important step in this direction," says Ng. "Previously, if someone wants a robot to use a pair of scissors, they will write a lot of software [defining] what scissors are and how the two blades move relative to each other. In contrast, Katz and Brock propose a completely new approach, where the robot plays with a pair of scissors by itself and figures out how the two blades are connected to each other."

Once UMan is linked to Cloud Computing it will be able to dialogue with humans and have embedded instruction to seek a particular object to perform a task. The connotations could be mind blogging as UMan interacts with humans whilst also manipulating objects at the same time. You could now imagine UMan become the house butler, bottle washer and nurse! And of course you would give your UMan a decent name (refer to blog reference AI 6).

AI 7: Prototypes already in play for humanoids aimed at the consumer and services market

The pictures show a humanoid called Dexter which has flexible joints, driven by air cylinders.

Dexter is able to walk on hard or soft surfaces, can run over uneven ground and can even jump.

Dexter is built by Anybots, Inc. and performed for the crowds at the Robo Development conference in San Jose.

Like Roomba (refer to blog reference AI 6), Dexter could be upgraded to include mobile technology and connect to a Cloud Service so it can engage in AI dialogue with its owner. This could include health advice (refer to blog reference AI 4) and of course creates new inventory and opportunities for advertising.

AI 6: Household consumer robots set for big growth as people give them ‘pet’ names

Roomba (see picture) is a home vacuuming product from iRobot, which has already sold over 2 million units. Though it does not look like a robot it is worth it sure acts like one.

Colin Angle, CEO and co-founder of iRobot, says, "When we started shipping Roomba in 2002, we asked focus groups if it was a robot. They said no, a robot was humanoid and this was an intelligent floor vacuum. Now people are definitely changing to accept robot appliances."

A survey showed most owners gave their Roombas pet names.

James Kuffner, an associate professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, says

However, once Roomba is upgraded to include mobile technology and connects to a Cloud Service then conversational AI can engage in dialogue with its owner. This could include health advice (refer to blog reference AI 5) and of course creates new inventory and opportunities for advertising.