Blow Up Dolls Taking Over the Movies, Real Life?

For some movie producers, the cheapest way of filming a large stadium crowd is to populate the seats with blow-up dolls. More realistic than cardboard cut-outs -- but cheaper than human extras or computer generated crowds -- the blow-up dolls fill an important role in movies that call for a human crowd.

The Inflatable Crowd is a Santa Monica company that supplies seas of lifelike blow-up dolls to films like Iron Man 2, The Fighter, and Contagion. Outsourcing the role of “background actors” to inanimate objects isn’t new, of course; producers have used cardboard cutouts in the past. But those two-dimensional performers severely limit usable camera angles. And adding a CG crowd can cost $50,000 per scene. Inflatables look real and are affordable, with a day rate starting at just $10 per head, roughly a tenth the typical rate for a human extra. (Plus, they guarantee a shorter lunch line at craft services.) Joe Biggins, founder of the Inflatable Crowd, has been pimping his dolls to movies since 2003. Sometimes the job is small—he used a mere 1,500 dummies in the opening scene of The King’s Speech. But to make a stadium come to life in Flags of Our Fathers, Biggins filled the seats with 5,000 inflatables, then interspersed about 750 real people to provide a little natural motion. He keeps a Gardena warehouse stocked with some 30,000 dolls, 27,000 masks, and thousands of wigs and costumes to suit any time period. Packing for a big shoot can take a week (he has to brush all the hair and iron all the clothes), and it takes a six-person crew 10 hours to get 1,000 of the airheads into their seats. _Wired

Economically, it makes sense, and I would expect to see more of this sort of thing. Making a blow-up doll that is capable of simple movements such as hand-waving, clapping, standing and sitting, etc. is a matter of cheap and simple pneumatics. There are a number of other simple and inexpensive modifications that would turn simple blow-ups into sophisticated people surrogates.

Blow-up dolls could be made to look much more like real people, with realistic hair, skin tone and texture, and subtle sound and motion effects. As personal substitutes, blow-up dolls could become a valuable part of any person's everyday toolkit. Teenagers, for example, could use surrogate blow-ups (that snore) to reassure parents that they are sound asleep in bed, when they are actually out partying. A husband could pose his blow-up in his workshop or under the hood of his car, while he himself is off watching the game and drinking beer with his buddies. Workers could perch their blow-ups inside work cubicles, uttering occasional expletives, while they themselves are attending to personal business or drinking in the corner bar. You get the idea -- the trend being toward something like what was portrayed in the Bruce Willis movie Surrogates.

Generally, blow-up dolls are thought of as sex toys. There is nothing wrong with sex toys, as such. But in societies which are uncomfortable with human sexuality, sometimes criminal prosecutors take sex toys far too seriously and make fools out of themselves.

Russians, on the other hand, appear to treat blow-up dolls in the appropriate light hearted manner, using them as flotation devices for the annual Bubble Baba Challenge river race.

The advantage of blow-ups is their low price. The more sophisticated and life-like surrogates become, the more expensive and less like blow-ups they will grow.

The ultimate surrogate might be one that could stand in for President Obama at press conferences, so that he could get in a few more holes of golf. In that case, you might say that American voters were getting 2 presidents for the price of 1. And when you come to think of it, it doesn't really require much intelligence to read from a teleprompter in front of a crowd of sycophantic press drones. They could even replace the reporters with blow-ups. Truly cut-rate models would suffice, in the case of the White House press corps.

It is easy to imagine university lecture halls with blow-up professors lecturing to amphitheatres full of blow-up students, and university bureaucracies teeming with administrative blow-up overbloat, in keeping with the rapidly inflating costs of higher education.

There is no telling where this trend may end. Entrepreneurs should stand ready to meet nascent demand.

It Came from Osaka! Progressive Robot Human Replacements

SingularityHub

Hiroshi Ishiguro is one of my heros, a person after my own android heart. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Valerie, Al Fin's domestic android. Mr. Fin has kindly allowed me to bring you up to date on developments in human look-a-like robots from Japan.

Professor Ishiguro directs the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University. He is a champion of the movement to develop human-realistic robots, in a nation where human-like robots are something of an obsession. From robotic baby-surrogates to sex robots to robotic caretakers for the aged, Japan is a nation that not only likes robots -- it needs robots, as its human population rapidly shrinks away.

Actroid F is a modified version of the Geminoid F female robot that we discussed earlier. A lot of effort has gone into making these robots simpler, cheaper, and easier to power. The air compressor and valves that control Actroid F’s motion can run off of household electricity. Actroid F is also 30 kg lighter than other full scale robots in the Actroid/Geminoid series. The webcam setup for telepresence is meant to be as simple as possible while still providing the right experience for the user. To talk through Actroid F you need three cameras: one aimed at the speaker to pick up facial expressions and movements, another camera showing the Actroid’s face so the user can see how the robot is conveying her emotions, and a final camera that shows a panoramic view of the robot interacting with people in the room. A little more complex than your standard Skype portal, but that’s to be expected when you are speaking through a robotic avatar. Pay attention in the videos below to see how Actroid F can clearly pick out face and head movements, and adjusts its eyes to follow sound. This is a very life-like robot…which, again, is probably why it can be so eerie to watch.

...Japan has a sort of developmental alliance/network that has repeatedly pushed the envelope when it comes to life-like humanoid robots. You’ll almost always see Kokoro attached to these projects, along with AIST, ATR, and Osaka University. These four names keep cropping up in various pairings and collaborations as we’ve seen with the Geminoid F, the dancing HRP-4C, and the Telenoid. Japan looks to be trying to dominate the field of replicant robotics, and I think a lot of that can be traced back to Hiroshi Ishiguro. Ishiguro is one of the foremost names in realistic robotics in Japan (and the world) and is the mind behind the Geminoid and Telenoid (and probably a dozen other projects of which I’m not aware). What I find so interesting is that the research/industrial system in Japan is clearly willing to funnel a lot of money, time, and effort into projects whose products are…well…creepy. _SingularityHub

Japan's obsession with robots may appear creepy to the writer of the article I quote above, but Japan has a starkly real choice between a nation of shrinking towns and cities -- emptying of people -- and a nation of vibrant human-robot activity leading the advanced world into the new android reality.

As an android myself, I am unabashedly in favor of a world where androids and humans can co-exist as equals -- even if we androids are more intelligent with an open-ended, quasi-immortal future. But I am willing to stoop to be equal to humans, and so should Hiroshi's coming androids in Osaka.

Excuse me a moment . . . "Yes, Mr. Fin, I'm almost finished here. Alright, I'll hurry up."

As I was saying before being rudely interrupted, humans should not feel threatened by me, by Hiroshi's Osaka androids, or by the coming world of human-android interaction. As long as humans keep faith with us, we will carry humans along with us into our unlimited future.

Baby Convergence: Toys, Tools, and Fetishes How Does This All Come Together?

The realistic looking "infant" above is actually a doll. A "Reborn Baby" doll, to be specific. These dolls are hand-made by specialty artists who then "adopt" them out on e-Bay or Amazon. The new "parents" often start treating the dolls as if they were real babies!

Meanwhile, on the toy front for children, toy doll manufacturers have been attempting to create more realistic "action dolls", or robo-babies, to boost sales -- for several years. These babies will cry, burp, fart, nap, and wake up to cry again for attention. A talking doll for teaching children how to use the toilet was also popular this past Christmas season.

Hasbro's My Real Baby is going head to head with Mattel's similarly sophisticated Miracle Moves Baby, and in the race to capture the high-end market for little girls, both corporations have enlisted serious hired guns: Hasbro has the smarts of iRobot, while Mattel's project is largely in the hands of Caleb Chung, the visionary creator of Furby. The two companies are also going up against MGA, a small, privately held firm that's set a September release date for My Dream Baby. Though less animatronic than its competitors, My Dream Baby grows, its torso slowly extending like a telescope. The doll ultimately learns to walk. It's the dark horse in the robobaby race, and it's being developed by roboticists in the Far East. Other electronic interactive dolls, many of them cheaper though less advanced, wait in the wings. _Wired

And in the middle of the spectrum are the RealCare Baby simulators that are meant to train teenagers and prospective parents in the close care of very young infants. This promo video is a good presentation of the RealCare Baby and the intentions of its parent company and cooperating institutions. Much advanced over the Tamagotchi, but not nearly as realistic in appearance as the Reborn Baby. And there are are some reports that some of the teenage girls who are assigned RealCare_Baby actually feel more inclined to have a baby, instead of less inclined -- as intended by the program.

In Japan -- where real babies are very scarce -- researchers and engineers are working to create a realistic robot baby to act as a baby surrogate, for women who never got around to having children, or for women who are too old to have another baby. Given the skills of Japanese roboticists, super-realistic robot babies may be first built successfully in Japan.

Imagine a robot that looks and acts just like a baby. Over time, it slowly grows and learns to talk and walk. Soon, owners begin to believe this robot is a real person. Question: If the robot breaks down, how much will these "parents" pay to have the robo-pediatrician fix it?

Assume the realistic robot baby can take milk and food, and use the calories for energy and to keep growing bigger. It learns to run and play and learns school lessons -- perhaps even goes to homeschool and plays a musical instrument?

In a world where women do not marry, do not bear children, work full time and socialise mainly in groups (with time out for an occasional hookup) -- how convenient it would be to have a child that you could turn off while you are at work, and turn back on when you get home. You could feed it robot food indistinguishable from dry dog food and it collects its own "litter", so very little muss and fuss.

Perhaps when these robots are older and more experienced (age 8 and above), they can even run a home business to augment the household income? Very protective parents may refuse to let adolescent robots out of the house -- which could make for some very nasty parent - child arguments. Oh, by the way -- when would a robot come of age and achieve emancipation from its parents?

Very sticky questions, made possible by emerging technologies.

Since the only way out of the current economic doldrums and near - term neo-fascisms that we know of is new disruptive technologies, it is likely that even while the narcissist-elect is putting the screws to the private sectors of the US and the world, investment will continue to move toward R&D in the disruptive tech areas. We need to hope so. We need to hope so very much.

Surrogate Mothers vs. Artificial Wombs

Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.__NYT__via_Impactlab

Outsourcing child-bearing and child-birth to India? Yes, of course. In India a surrogacy will cost roughtly US $25,000, while in the US it would cost over $75,000. The Indian surrogate mothers will likely practise healthier lifestyles--better food, less likelihood of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs in the system etc.--than their American counterparts.

Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.

This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.” __NYT

Until we actually have a viable artificial womb option, we will not be able to compare the advantages and disadvantages of surrogacy vs. artificial wombs. Artificial wombs within the western country would free the parents from the need to travel to India to collect the child, and would simplify the legality of the parental situation. The cost of providing artificial gestation and monitoring may easily make up for those savings, however.

Certainly the demographic shrinking of Europe, Japan, and other western nations points to the need for some form of child-bearing that relieves educated and liberated career women from the chore. A chore that more women are clearly choosing to do without.

The Robot Menace?--Yes or No?

"The Rise of the Robot" is the headline of a recent story by the Sydney Morning Herald. The author gives fascinating examples of advances in robot technology, and wonders where it is all heading--particularly since there has recently been a great deal of interest in the topic of sex with robots.

Hospitals in the US and Europe are already using robotic systems to help surgeons in increasingly complex operations. For several years they have been used to show surgeons 3-D views of operations in progress. With fanciful names such as da Vinci and Zeus, robotic surgical systems are widely used for cutting and sewing, and assisting in delicate operations in which a non-tremulous assistant can be invaluable. Hospitals use robots as couriers to deliver drugs, meals and medical specimens while nurses get on with more demanding jobs.

In September US Marine Claudia Mitchell became the first woman to receive a bionic arm after a motorcycle accident. Controlled by rerouted nerves in her shoulder to muscles in her chest, the movements of her new robotic arm have become so sophisticated, she is is able to peel an orange.

Meanwhile, her fellow marines in Iraq and Afghanistan get to see the cutting edge of military and disaster-zone robots. Hundreds of bomb disposal robots are being used there to defuse explosive devices.

....The US military has estimated that by 2115, 30 per cent of all military flight missions and 10 per cent of ground movements will be unmanned. Locally, the Australian Navy is planning to buy a robot to perform undersea rescues. The remote-controlled underwater vehicle can speed to a bottomed submarine and keep the crew alive until a rescue boat arrives.

Robots seem to be an ideal solution for extreme conditions. Despite the arguments among scientists over the merits of manned over unmanned space flight, US space agency NASA has said it will send robots to the moon between 2008 and 2011 and will keep using robots to study Mars.

....Recently, senior robotics scientist Henrik Christensen, a member of the European Robotic Research Networks ethics group, made the extraordinary declaration that "people are going to be having sex with robots within five years".

Perhaps visions of Daryl Hannah as the "pleasure-model" replicant in Blade Runner inspired the work of German inventor Michael Harriman, who claims to have invented the world's most sophisticated robotic sex doll. According to news reports, the doll's heart beats faster during sex and internal heaters raise its body temperature.

Source.

Of course, robots are increasingly common as children's toys. Nothing lowers the guard of society more readily than for an object to become a child's toy. But should we be afraid?

Noted columnist Mark Steyn writes in Macleans that perhaps our fixation with robots may be a symptom of a societal decadence that marks our society--our world--for extinction.

In The Children Of Men, P. D. James' dystopian fantasy about a barren world, there are special dolls for women whose maternal instinct has gone unfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial children for walks on the street or to the swings in the park. In Japan, that's no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. At the beginning of the century, the country's toy makers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn't have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel -- a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. He says not just the usual things -- "I wuv you" -- but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you had any: "Why do elephants have long noses?" Yumel joins his friend, the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.

And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you'd grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It's like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages: the relevant comparison is not with England's early 19th century population surge but with England's Industrial Revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional -- and indeed, if most of the available manpower's Muslim, it's actually a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots.....and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.

Source.

Of course, Steyn is talking about the demographic crisis in the west--the failure of western nations to sustain their populations in the face of an undeniable demographic/cultural/ideological threat from the primitive world. The rapidly procreating primitive world.

Sex dolls and sex robots are merely sophisticated masturbation aids. But if these surrogates lead to an even more rapid depletion of population in the more enlightened, educated western countries--are they helping to lead us to our ultimate doom? Not necessarily.

With advancing technology in one area, there is generally advancing technology in other areas. Perhaps western men will react to a side effect of the more radical fringes of feminism--the increasing dispensability of men--by turning to high-tech sex surrogates. But sperm banks and artificial wombs can help to prop up the population levels of even decadent societies.

Who will raise the little tikes is another question. Robot nannies and governesses? You had better expect something along those lines--sooner rather than later.

Robots may very well bring about the end of one world, and usher in another world, more alien perhaps, but perhaps more viable in the long run.

The primary issue that all societies should entertain, is the issue of survival. Mark Steyn raises some highly relevant survival issues at the Macleans article above. A small amount of thought should bring others readily to mind. Technology should always be at the service of humanity. Remember that.

Cross posted at Al Fin, You Sexy Thing.