Kenji and our Human Reality and Paradox

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I'm just catching on to this bit about Kenji, the wide-eyed configuration above.  Story was, Toshiba researchers programmed the pale-green fellow to fall in love.  Which he (it) did.  But he (it) went too far:

The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji.

This article from Reality Pod even came with a sexier yet more harrowing image:

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We learn to be skeptical about stories like these on the internet.  Turns out, it's a fabricated story - The Truth About Kenji, the Robot Programmed to Love.

Yet the robo tall tale continues to quietly circulate around the web four years later, masquerading as blogged truth. This April Fool’s Day, when all of our feeds are brimming with gags, fictions, and jokey might-as-well-be-truths, it’s worth taking a look at how a minor, haphazard hoax has grown a rather long tail.

Not a surprise.  

The veracity of stories that a publication puts out is a big deal.  The worse that can happen, I imagine, is for them to label something as news when in fact it's a hoax.  That's an egg-in-the-face embarrassment.  So Brian Merchant, writer of the foregoing article in Motherboard, is right for digging into the story and casting veiled aspersion on the likes of Reality Pod.  

But I have two takes on this.

One, we laud truth and reality, as we should.  Yet, we seem to relish myth and fiction just as much, if not more.  Case in point:  Our love for films and plays, novels and mythology, plus makeup and photo shop.  More specifically, our fascination with sentient robots is evident in films, such as Bicentennial Man, A.I. and I, Robot.  

Why is it that data scientists, for instance, diminish gut-based decisions and instead advance Big Data and analytics?  Why is it that many of us, managers, for instance, are encouraged to think logically or objectively, as if emotion were a pox on humanity?  

Yet, in related sectors of science, we hear time and time again this aim of making robots that are human-like.  Which presumably accounts for all that make us non-robotic:  that is, subjectivity, imagination, and again emotion.  In A.I., that's the working dream of the scientist that William Hurt plays:  to create an android boy that can bond emotionally with human parents.     

Two, enter:  IBM.  

How do we get computers to behave and think and interact the way humans do?

So asks Dr. Katherine Frase, VP Industries Research, IBM.  This is not exactly a new idea, as I've argued here.  Still, IBM is planted firmly in reality and technology and I am fascinated by their work.  But this, and Frase's question in particular, are the quintessential paradox of humans.

The meta-question for IBM is, Why ask that question, that is, why aim to do that?    

What's more, the double paradox here is that Frase and her colleagues must account for, and build in, paradox in their cutting-edge technology, if in fact they aim to get computers to behave and think and interact the way humans do.  Such a built-in paradox may not be possible, or even desirable, and it may not be reconcilable in any case.

The Kenji story is simply an element of this larger human reality, aspiration, and paradox.

We are fascinated by fiction, as much as we may ridicule it.  We cast aside qualities about ourselves that we don't like, yet create machines that possess these very qualities.  We want robots that fall in love with us, when we seem to have such difficulty loving one another.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD