Focus on Arts and Ecology

When it comes time for Ishi­guro to go to college, he chooses a school using three criteria: It will accept an eccentric, sometimes indifferent student like himself; it’s somewhere he can pursue his drawing and painting; and it’s not very close to home. In the fall of 1981, he lands at the University of Yamanashi, near Mount Fuji.
Once there, Ishi­guro continues his careless approach to his studies, finding more pleasure in the string of odd jobs he takes to pay the bills—he works as a cook, the supervisor of a children’s after-school program, a door-to-door textbook salesman (that one lasts a week), and, most lucrative of all, a professional pachinko player. He finds himself on the fringes of student life, rejecting any semblance of mainstream Japanese ambition.
At the same time, he is fashioning himself into that most romantic of outsiders: an artist. Always in a black leather jacket, he skips classes, packs his pads and pencils, and rides his Yamaha chopper into the nearby countryside to sketch the landscape. This is his focus: the strange, organic shapes of the trees, the peach blossoms that appear in the springtime. He produces drawings and oil paintings, and manages to sell a few.
But in his third year, Ishi­guro abruptly gives up painting. Unless he can become a great artist and a tremendous public success, he sees no point in it. (He blames, in part, his color blindness: He is drawn to landscapes, but the entire spectrum of green eludes him.) He has lost what little direction he had. On his darker days, when he takes his motorcycle on a steep and winding road, Ishi­guro imagines giving in to the impulse to not make the turn. To drive straight ahead, fly right off the edge—what would that feel like?
Then a path presents itself. Yamanashi offers courses in the new field of computer science, and Ishi­guro begins to wonder what relationship computer graphics and computer vision might have to the visual arts. These are the early days of the PC, and programming seems wildly creative. Feeling he has little to lose, he switches majors.
Almost immediately, certain elements in his brain click into place: Ishi­guro realizes he can continue to think like a painter in this unpoliced field, but with different tools. He falls in love with the new vocabulary: Assembler, Pascal. The students are relegated to working in a ­single room kept bitterly cold, loud with the hum of the huge computers—conditions designed for the comfort of machines, not humans. He works alone, on software development, but he is learning to communicate with a system—a system that responds to his commands. They have entered into a dialog.
Ishi­guro soon gives up his rides through the country for entire days spent in the lab. And as he becomes more fluent in this new language, more immersed in a conversation with the large machines, a fantasy takes shape: Could there be a way to make this language more humanlike, so that someday computers might understand us intuitively, on our own terms? So that this dialog might become a relationship?
This relationship becomes his singular pursuit, his dream.

Three years later, in 2005, Ishiguro unveils Repliee Q1 Expo to the public. Modeled on a grown woman (a popular Tokyo newscaster) and produced with better funding, this version can move its upper body fluidly and lip-synch to recorded speech. Ishi­guro’s lab conducts several studies with it; the results are featured in a major Japanese robotics journal; the lab is filmed for television; he hears about a copycat android in South Korea. As a growing audience is drawn to Ishiguro’s simulated human, his instincts are validated.
But he now wants something more. Twice he has witnessed others have the opportunity, however confusing, to encounter their robot self, and he covets that experience. Besides, his daughter was too young, and the newscaster, though an adult, was, in his words, merely an “ordinary” person: Neither was able to analyze their android encounter like a trained scientist. A true researcher should have his own double. Flashing back to his previous life as a painter, Ishi­guro thinks: This will be another form of self-portrait. He gives the project his initials: Geminoid HI. His mechanical twin.
Ishi­guro has hundreds of photos of the Geminoid’s assembly. Here is his assistant wrapping the facsimile of his then-43-year-old face around the machine head and zipping it up the back, its bald scalp studded with sensors. Here is the Geminoid seated upright, a padded vest in place of its torso, its mechanical biceps visible, its arms only “flesh” below the elbows, as if it were wearing elegant gloves. The hands have veins and sunspots and the faint wrinkles that gather around the wrists; the nails have cuticles, pale and precise. Here it is dressed, in a fitted black shirt identical to Ishi­guro’s. His assistant raises its arms, one by one, to tug down the sleeves, as if dressing a complicated child.
It also wears fitted black slacks, like Ishi­guro’s, and black sneakers stuffed with prosthetic feet in matching socks; a black wig, styled like the hair of its maker, is fastened onto the android’s scalp with snaps. Here is the machine that pumps air into its chest—a series of cables runs from its tailbone into a metal box—as the professor’s double sits at attention and speaks for the first time.
This android is a step forward, but it still falls well short of verisimilitude. Its hands, at rest on its lap, are rubbery to the touch; its eyes have a surprising intensity, not unlike Ishi­guro’s, but they are clearly made of a hard, bright plastic. Lean in close and you can hear the soft hum of a hidden motor; a gentle click is audible each time it blinks. At times, its overall effect, and that of its sisters, is of a human-sized puppet—like the animatronics in a Disney World display. But the Geminoid is also unsettling. Because, somehow, all these elements work in concert to simulate a sympathetic interaction with a human. The viewer cannot help but assign an entire range of emotions to its face: melancholic (mouth downturned), upset (eyes squinted shut), skeptical (a sideways glance), pensive (the tilt of its head to the left). When its eyes meet yours, motion sensors detecting your position, just for a moment you feel that it—this “he,” this “Ishi­guro”—is aware of you.
This replica, Geminoid HI, brings Ishi­guro the recognition he has longed for. Using his double, he and his team publish dozens of studies, analyzing the participants’ range of reactions to him and his doppelgänger. (The studies involve operating the android remotely and wirelessly: tele­operation.) Side by side, he and his Geminoid make appearances on TV shows across Asia and Europe. Ishi­guro also begins giving lectures around the world without leaving his lab in Osaka, teleoperating and speaking through the android, which is carefully transported abroad by an assistant. (Its legs and torso are checked with the luggage; its head is carry-on.) Ishi­guro-sensei becomes a source of fascination; he is transformed from a researcher to the man who made his copy. Invitations for conferences and festivals stream in.
The success of this particular android is due, in part, to how it seems to operate on several levels. It is, like its predecessors, a circus trick: Look at the human, look at his copy! Try to tell them apart! It is also Ishi­guro’s bid at solving an existential dilemma—a striking attempt by the maker to master himself, to make of himself something more enduring.
At the same time, it has created a new predicament. Ishi­guro has discovered unexpected consequences of living alongside his own replica. He’s been dressing in black since his grad-school years, and now this has become both his and the HI’s official uniform; he was thrilled to realize this clearer vision of himself. But now he must keep his (naturally shifting, aging) human body corralled within the android’s static limits. He finds himself accommodating his android, measuring himself against it, being defined by it, his worth determined by it. In this way, his android makes him both painfully conscious of his aging body and more physically confident than he’s ever been.
Ishi­guro is multiple myths simultaneously. With his female androids, he is Pygmalion, bringing his Galatea to life. But with his own replica, he is Narcissus, staring into his reflection for hours. Unlike Narcissus, of course, Ishi­guro is conscious of the situation he has created, but he’s set an unexpected trap for himself through his image. He poses beside his android, in press photos and TV appearances, in ways that accommodate the Geminoid, setting his face to mirror its expression. (At one point at the research institute, Ishi­guro notices me photographing him in front of his android and reflexively drops his smile to match the robot at rest.)
Soon his students begin comparing him to the Geminoid—“Oh, professor, you are getting old,” they tease—and Ishi­guro finds little humor in it. A few years later, at 46, he has another cast of his face made, to reflect his aging, producing a second version of HI. But to repeat this process every few years would be costly and hard on his vanity. Instead, Ishi­guro embraces the logi­cal alternative: to alter his human form to match that of his copy. He opts for a range of cosmetic procedures—laser treatments and the injection of his own blood cells into his face. He also begins watching his diet and lifting weights; he loses about 20 pounds. “I decided not to get old anymore,” says Ishi­guro, whose English is excellent but syntactically imperfect. “Always I am getting younger.”
Remaining twinned with his creation has become a compulsion. “Android has my identity,” he says. “I need to be identical with my android, otherwise I’m going to lose my identity.” I think back to another photo of his first double’s construction: Its robot skull, exposed, is a sickly yellow plastic shell with openings for glassy teeth and eyeballs. When I ask what he was thinking as he watched this replica of his own head being assembled, Ishi­guro says, perhaps only half-joking, “I thought I might have this kind of skull if I removed my face.”
Now he points at me. “Why are you coming here? Because I have created my copy. The work is important; android is important. But you are not interested in myself.”

On a Saturday night, I meet up with Hiroshi and Rosario Sorbello, a robotics professor from the University of Palermo who makes a couple of pilgrimages to Hiroshi’s lab each year. He often sends his students to study there, and he arranged for Hiroshi’s android play to be performed in Sicily. For a tall man in a well-tailored suit and fine leather shoes, Sorbello is boyish, and he clearly relishes his access to Hiroshi—he reminds me, twice, that Hiroshi is “a very important person.”
We meet in Minami, one of Osaka’s hectic shopping districts, and have an evening of street food: huge bowls of ramen and batter-fried balls of octopus. (Hiroshi used to come here a lot in his days as a poor grad student.) After red-bean dessert soup, served by a woman in a ruffled apron, Hiroshi makes a decision: Rather than head to a bar, he says we should go to “the bar in my office.” En route, we stop at a fluorescent-lit, 24-hour convenience store to pick up drinking food—wasabi peas, octopus jerky, chocolate Pocky Sticks—before boarding the train back to the university.
As Hiroshi scrolls through his phone, Sorbello talks about the desire for intimacy with androids—something he’s clearly thought a lot about. “Can you imagine what it would be like,” he asks, “to want to kiss a robot? To want to kiss that rubber, not-human flesh? There are people who have those kinds of desires. Imagine if you could run heat through its skin so that it feels not like cold rubber but warm to the touch? There are people who want to try things with that.” Human sexual and romantic relationships are unavoidably messy, he says, and many people would like to keep their lives simple—in which case a relationship with an android might be a solution. “I think this is the future,” he says.
Sex is arguably the ultimate physical act of human connection—but it can also be merely that: an act, a simulation of intimacy. Sex can be thought of as something that transcends the purely physical, but in reality it is often an experience that’s mostly physical, not as intimate as we pretend it can or should be. Looked at in this light, a whole range of sexual experience, at least in theory, could be replicated with an android.
On Sorbello’s recommendation, I later read Love and Sex With Robots, a 2007 book by AI expert David Levy. In it he proposes that we are not far from a time (he suggests roughly the year 2050) when humans will desire robots as friends, sexual partners, even spouses—a premise he seems unnervingly OK with. It all comes down to our willingness to believe in the robot’s emotional life and desires. Designed with the physical proportions that its human owner prefers, the preferred voice timbre and eye color and personality type, and the ability to recall and riff on its owner’s personal stories and little jokes, android will captivate human.
Levy takes Alan Turing’s famous claim that the convincing appearance of intelligence (in AI) is proof of intelligence, and he expands that into the emotional realm: “If a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue that it does not? If a robot’s artificial emotions prompt it to say things such as ‘I love you,’ surely we should be willing to accept these statements at face value … Why, if a robot that we know to be emotionally intelligent, says, ‘I love you’ or ‘I want to make love to you,’ should we doubt it?” Human emotions, he argues, are no less “programmed” than those of an intelligent machine: “We have hormones, we have neurons, and we are ‘wired’ in a way that creates our emotions.”
In other words, Levy argues, our inner lives are essentially algorithmic, much like an AI’s. A few decades from now, he writes, the differences between human and android may be “no greater than the cultural differences between peoples from different countries or even from different parts of the same country.” As for the actual sex, Levy believes that it will become not only a recourse for the socially isolated but also an accepted outlet for the sexually adventurous or for someone whose partner is sick or traveling.