Losing One's Head
Issue 14.04 - April 2006
WIRED magazine
Losing One's Head
It's a story as strange as anything PKD ever wrote - a body of work that includes the short stories behind the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly. It involves, naturally, a robot, a group of confused humans, and a series of misunderstandings. The head was built by David Hanson, founder of Hanson Robotics. The self-described sculptor-roboticist, who has a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and did some undergrad work in AI, specializes in creating amazingly realistic robot faces sheathed in a rubbery polymer he calls f'rubber. The bots have a wide range of facial expressions driven by dozens of tiny servomotors. They make eye contact with passersby through motion-tracking machine vision and can engage in complex conversations via AI speech software. They even recognize familiar faces.
It was PKD - the author - who drew Hanson to robotics in the first place. "Reading books like Valis motivated me to build robots that would help save humans from their own destructive tendencies," he says.
The creator of several robots, including the Albert Einstein head for the bot that appeared on the cover of Wired in January, Hanson spent $25,000 of his own money building his hero.
Hanson and software developer Andrew Olney studied the author's life and used his novels - particularly We Can Build You - as a blueprint for applying PKD's personality to the robot. The head won first place in a competition sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and the Smithsonian was planning to exhibit it this fall.
Until December, that is, when Google invited Hanson and Olney to demo the PKD head at company headquarters in Silicon Valley. Hanson had been traveling for weeks, making two trips to Asia and pulling 15 all-nighters in 40 days. "I got on the plane in Dallas at 5 in the morning, after getting maybe 45 minutes of sleep the night before," he recalls. "I stuck the bag containing the robot head in the overhead bin and fell asleep. I didn't even know we were changing planes in Las Vegas. The flight attendant woke me up, and I walked off the plane in a fog - with the robot head still in the overhead bin."
When Hanson arrived at the San Francisco airport, he finally realized he had left his bot behind. Hanson was determined not to lose his head, having already lost Philip K. Dick's. "I thought, 'OK, OK, everything's going to be cool; they're going to find this bag,'" he says. "There's no mistaking this bag - it's got a robot head in it. When you open it, it's just wires and flesh and a bearded dude's face."
On the ground, Hanson says, America West officials told him that the plane carrying PKD was en route to Orange County; the crew would look for his robot when it landed. They said PKD had turned up at the Las Vegas airport after all. It was packed in a secure box and would be put on the next flight to SFO. The flight landed safely, but the head didn't. Somewhere over the Sierra Nevada, it had vanished.
America West officials say they've looked everywhere and that the search continues. If the head doesn't reappear, they told Hanson, they may consider a "happy ending" scenario, like sponsoring a new bot. In the meantime, the head could be resting on a warehouse shelf at an Alabama salvage company that buys items unclaimed after 30 days. Hanson suspects the head was either stolen by an unscrupulous baggage handler or fell victim to an overzealous security guard who called in a bomb squad. "That would be a really strange ending," Hanson says, "if the head of a Philip K. Dick robot wound up being exploded by another robot."
- Tom McNichol
WIRED magazine
Losing One's Head
It's a story as strange as anything PKD ever wrote - a body of work that includes the short stories behind the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly. It involves, naturally, a robot, a group of confused humans, and a series of misunderstandings. The head was built by David Hanson, founder of Hanson Robotics. The self-described sculptor-roboticist, who has a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and did some undergrad work in AI, specializes in creating amazingly realistic robot faces sheathed in a rubbery polymer he calls f'rubber. The bots have a wide range of facial expressions driven by dozens of tiny servomotors. They make eye contact with passersby through motion-tracking machine vision and can engage in complex conversations via AI speech software. They even recognize familiar faces.
It was PKD - the author - who drew Hanson to robotics in the first place. "Reading books like Valis motivated me to build robots that would help save humans from their own destructive tendencies," he says.
The creator of several robots, including the Albert Einstein head for the bot that appeared on the cover of Wired in January, Hanson spent $25,000 of his own money building his hero.
Hanson and software developer Andrew Olney studied the author's life and used his novels - particularly We Can Build You - as a blueprint for applying PKD's personality to the robot. The head won first place in a competition sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and the Smithsonian was planning to exhibit it this fall.
Until December, that is, when Google invited Hanson and Olney to demo the PKD head at company headquarters in Silicon Valley. Hanson had been traveling for weeks, making two trips to Asia and pulling 15 all-nighters in 40 days. "I got on the plane in Dallas at 5 in the morning, after getting maybe 45 minutes of sleep the night before," he recalls. "I stuck the bag containing the robot head in the overhead bin and fell asleep. I didn't even know we were changing planes in Las Vegas. The flight attendant woke me up, and I walked off the plane in a fog - with the robot head still in the overhead bin."
When Hanson arrived at the San Francisco airport, he finally realized he had left his bot behind. Hanson was determined not to lose his head, having already lost Philip K. Dick's. "I thought, 'OK, OK, everything's going to be cool; they're going to find this bag,'" he says. "There's no mistaking this bag - it's got a robot head in it. When you open it, it's just wires and flesh and a bearded dude's face."
On the ground, Hanson says, America West officials told him that the plane carrying PKD was en route to Orange County; the crew would look for his robot when it landed. They said PKD had turned up at the Las Vegas airport after all. It was packed in a secure box and would be put on the next flight to SFO. The flight landed safely, but the head didn't. Somewhere over the Sierra Nevada, it had vanished.
America West officials say they've looked everywhere and that the search continues. If the head doesn't reappear, they told Hanson, they may consider a "happy ending" scenario, like sponsoring a new bot. In the meantime, the head could be resting on a warehouse shelf at an Alabama salvage company that buys items unclaimed after 30 days. Hanson suspects the head was either stolen by an unscrupulous baggage handler or fell victim to an overzealous security guard who called in a bomb squad. "That would be a really strange ending," Hanson says, "if the head of a Philip K. Dick robot wound up being exploded by another robot."
- Tom McNichol
posted by TonPo at 11:30 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home