What's In A Face?

I listen to the radio when I drive on long trips. There is almost a gambler's thrill in finding a quality program out of the static and junk on the airwaves. It is so cool to find a DJ that actually cares about music and is allowed to stray off the station playlist. Other times you have that rare broadcast that isn't centered around the 12 - 18 minutes of commercial ads every hour. There are plenty of ways to circumvent commercial radio and listen to only what I want but I really enjoy when some quite literally out of the blue surprises me.

By accident I tuned into a technology a program interviewing a team of computer scientists from Cambridge. Out of that wonderful sense of British whimsy they built a robotic head of Charles Babbage.  If your unaware of Charles Babbage, don't feel bad most people have no idea who he was. Long before the basics of electronic computing was conceived Charles Babbage devised on paper a mechanical computer. His machine was programmable, it had information storage and  information retrieval. Historically there was a real possibility the information revolution could have happen alongside the industrial revolution in Victorian England. In a past posting, Charles Babbage - father of steampunk, I wrote about how the London Museum took Babbage's plans and built the machine he could not get funding for.    

So this team from Cambridge built a robotic head so that user of the computer can have a face to interact with. Part of their research showed people had a better experience with their computers when they could relate to the machine as though it was a living person. The Charles Babbage head was not the first attempt to have a computer controlled face expressing emotions but this time, through cameras in the eyes of the robotic head, the computer is registering and evaluating the facial expressions of the person at the keyboard.  It is a two way communication.

In the back of my mind is the 1964 New York World's Fair and "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln". It was the "best of" the 16th President presented not by a live actor but instead a robot. I could not tell what pavilion it was in but to this day I remember how the crowd gasped when it stood up to talk.  Mr. Lincoln was part of Disney's animatronics which also included It's A Small World, where hundreds of little robots sang that famous saccharine song -what the Guinness World book of Records would claim as history's most persistent earworm.    

    

The idea of creating the artificial person is an old one. Master clock makers built mechanical automatons, what were very complex dolls that mimic natural motion. Some automatons could play music or write.  People began to imagine automatons could be made to do almost anything. One of the greatest scams in history was The Great Turk, an automaton that played chess. In the early 1800's the machine went on tour and beat many human opponents. In the end it was exposed as a hoax, in the cabinet behind the gear works was hidden a real live chess master working the controls and making the moves.   

What the craftsmen and engineers of that time didn't have was an electronic computer. As gears, pulleys and other simple machines could copy the body, the computer has slowly been programmed to copy the mind. Even when electronic computers where as big as a house and had the overall computing power of a graphing calculator, that any high school student would use in Algebra 2, the pulp science fiction writers in 1950's were publishing stories of computer self-awareness and artificial intelligence spontaneously arising.  So it's only natural that computer geeks would want a home machine that could have all the personality of HAL from the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey -without the menacing one red eye.

There may come a day when the boundary between the mind and the computer will be breached. Information could be downloaded directly into the brain (the bio-cyber space) and the mind can be transferred into a digital existence.  Back in the early 1990's there was a TV mini-series -Wild Palms. For network TV it was very ambitious, it was also noteworthy because it was the only halfway descent dramatic role Jim Belushi ever played. In the end the antagonist of the story tries to escape by having his consciousness downloaded into a new type of immortality. 

The really big road block to having a computerized face to interface with, is something the Psychologists call the uncanny valley.  In short people can feel comfortable with a cartoon face because it's easily recognized as artificial. If there is no doubt the face is real then people treat it as real. In the spectrum of realism from the cartoon face to an actual face is the uncanny valley.  Somewhere between the ridiculous and the real is a creepy place where most people are uneasy. It why the Talking Tina doll in the original Twilight Zone still gives people goosebumps.

Producers of computer generated  movie effects had high hopes of bringing back Humphrey Bogart.  So far -no such luck. Having a sky full of World War 2 is so easy compared to the thousand tiny details that make a facial expression work or come off as authentic as a three dollar bill.  Or even worse -to  fall right in bottom of the uncanny valley and have ever hair on the back of your neck involuntarily stand up.

The first Final Fantasy film and the Polar Express, both big budget movies made up of computer generated content, failed to met commercial expectations. With the Final Fantasy film movie goers felt they could not identify with the flat expressionless characters. The Polar Express had young children crying in the theater. The Polar Express was re-edited to fix the dead un-blinking eyes that really bothered the audience but in the end the studios cut their losses on what should have been a new Christmas Classic.

The movie Avatar had taken the face capture technology to a new level. But putting a human face on a alien from another planet is still easy that creating a convincingly real human face from scratch.  In a generation or two will we be interacting with machines as though they are living sentient creatures? Or will people and machines be so seamlessly merge together that any distinction would be purely academic?