There's a revolution taking place, a veritable robot uprising right here in Hong Kong. Those in the vanguard of that revolution believe, before the robot becomes cleverer and more accomplished than humans, it must have sensitivity training so that it may empathize with our human failings. Timothy Chui writes.

Broken pipes growing out of decaying masonry, surrounding the cold, towering blue glass faade of Mong Kok's Langham Place, emit a quintessentially cyberpunk aura when it rains.

Ridley Scott, the director of Bladerunner, took his inspiration for a robot permeated dystopian urban landscape from right here in Hong Kong, not far from where many believe a real robot revolution is taking shape.

While Bladerunner's Mong Kok-inspired, fictional Los Angeles of the near future was the birthplace of mass-produced humanoid robots, Ben Goertzel, an American expert on artificial intelligence, predicts the real world robot revolution will begin here.

Goertzel is one of a four-man team building a humanoid robot for the mass market. Robots that can chop onions, whip up a stir fry, take out the trash, get the mail, massage your feet, bark like a dog and balance your books, as long as they don't break down.

From a height overlooking the world's most densely populated district, multi-colored umbrellas mix, mingle and collide in kaleidoscopic swirl, heated exhaust and vapors laden with the stink of the city are drawn skyward into the gloomy clouds. It's suffocating. Nature's light shines but dimly here. Soggy pedestrians deprived of illumination turn ambivalently to the giant outdoor televisions and jockeying neon signs.

"Hong Kong's hybridization of Chinese and Western cultures favors more open communication," Goertzel tells China Daily. "On the mainland, I think it's harder to get junior team members to share their creative, half-baked ideas with their supervisors or colleagues; whereas in Hong Kong it's easier. I think it's also true that mainland Chinese culture is a bit more 'closed' in terms of openly communicating ideas than Western culture."

Guangdong likely

He emphasizes, however, "if cheap, scalable robot manufacturing is going to happen anywhere, it's very likely to happen in Guangdong."

There is plenty of AI research underway on the mainland. Goertzel is chairman of the board of the Open Cog project, which allows developers to draw from a global bank of free-to-share algorithms that attempt to give robots the powers of human thoughts, which after all originate with electrochemical signals in the brain.

In his present endeavor, Goertzel, slightly disheveled, bespectacled and looking like the technical phenom who finished secondary school before puberty and got his PhD at 23, analyzes financial markets - using artificial intelligence. With that goes an impressive sounding title: chief science officer of financial prediction for Aidiyia Holdings.

Goertzel sees it like this: highly specialized robots have been the mainstay of robotics development in the US and Japan for years. He thinks robots are ready for the mainstream, but getting there will demand a carefully balanced ecosystem: creative critical mass, coupled with a viable production base, and an available market.

The kind of collective creative brainstorming and collaboration which often leads to breakthroughs is considerably easier to get going in Hong Kong, he said. Hong Kong has "an atmosphere where the team members are willing to share their half-baked ideas with each other and openly brainstorm. This may partly be because in Hong Kong my teams have been more international, mixing Hongkongese, Western and mainland Chinese members; and the Western team members have brought with them more of an anything-goes American startup-style mentality," he said.

Joining Goertzel is Mark Tilden - inventor of the highest selling, mass market consumer robots ever.

Caregiver robots

Tilden, a graduate of Canada's University of Waterloo, envisages robots as caregivers, capable of housecleaning, preparing meals and dispensing medication, "a robot you could give your mother to look after her into her dotage," and that will allow her "to live with dignity, to stay at home without the constant requirement of someone coming to deliver three or four meals a day."

Prior to setting up a Sai Kung lab where he tinkers during the cooler months, he was the founder of a divergent school of robotics thought - a keep-it-simple, bottom-up evolution of robotics versus the advanced prototypes unfit for mass marketing approach taken everywhere else.

He built his first robot when he was three, designed robots that sold more than 22 million units and built prototypes for the US military and NASA which contributed to the development of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Rovers.

The team plans to set up an advanced robotics lab here in Hong Kong. "The goal is to get a large space where we can start to develop grown-up robot products for mass market applications," Tilden said.

By designing in Hong Kong and churning them out in China, Tilden's robots "are 10 times less expensive to manufacture and distribute on average than conventional machines. I've sold over 20 million or so in the past decade, so the customers must like the prices," he said.

The third aspiring leader of the coming robotics revolution is David Hanson. He builds robots with character, robots which eventually will empathize with human users, robots able to see faces, show facial expression, make eye contact, and like HAL 9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, empathize with their human operators, engage in speech, model how a person is feeling and build relationships.

Hanson's field is the development of socially intelligent robots capable of human interaction, robots that one day will be able to take their place in the human family.

Hanson's work focuses on robots' perception of and by people. A robot's face is its natural interface and the more intuitive it is for people to interact with the easier they are to use and more accepted they become.

Human-robot interaction

Hanson is the creator of the most realistic humanoid robot faces ever. He will develop the basic aspects of human to robot interaction - the automoton's facial expressions and conversational abilities.

Hanson, who is moving to Hong Kong this fall, has already produced robots bearing the likeness and manner of Albert Einstein and American science fiction writer Philip K Dick, who penned Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, upon which the film Bladerunner was based.

Mark Tilden says the technology is already here. What remains is to figure out how to make it a part of daily life.

Goertzel remembers a time "when a large percentage of the population was uncomfortable with electronic musical instruments - they sounded unnatural, etc," he said.

"By and large the strange feeling folks got from electronic instruments is a thing of the past, and they're now considered an ordinary part of life, and certainly able to evoke the full range of emotional and musical experiences in the listener. The same sort of thing will happen with humanoid robots," he said.

Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Gino Yu is the fourth member of the team. Founder of Hong Kong's Digital Entertainment Association 12 years ago, he helps head PolyU's robotics lab and works with Goertzel on OpenCog.

"Robots provide a user interface and we're born hard-wired to look at faces and track them. Looking at a screen is quite uni-dimensional. If a robot has a face and eyes and is looking at you, nodding every now and then, it's a different experience," he said.

Emotional links to robots have been proven beyond those for fictional characters such as R2-D2 or Wall-E. Volunteers reported negative emotions when watching robots being abused in a study led by Astrid Rosenthal-von der Ptten of University of Duisburg Essen.

"Hong Kong is already the consumer robot capital of the world. Japan has made a handful of robots with short battery life while millions of units of consumer robots developed in Hong Kong have already been shipped. We're already the leader of the world with our more user-centered approach, it's a matter of maintaining that lead," Yu said.

Contact the writer at timothy@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 08/23/2013 page1)