Terrifying robot video after the jump

Hey, guess which country is building terrifying humanoid robots!

The creators of the Child-robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, say it’s slowly developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, mimicking a mother-baby relationship. The team is trying to teach the pint-sized android to think like a baby who evaluates its mother’s countless facial expressions and “clusters” them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness.

Professor Minoru Asada, also a member of the Japanese Society of Baby Science [Editor's Note: !!!!!], said the CB2 has taught itself how to walk with the aid of a human and can now move its body through a room quite smoothly, using 51 “muscles” driven by air pressure.

In coming decades, Asada expects science will come up with a “robo species” that has learning abilities somewhere between those of a human and other primate species such as the chimpanzee [hopefully without the chimp-like propensity to rip off your face and genitals].

Thousands of humanoids could be working alongside humans in a decade or so, if that is what society wants, said Fumio Miyazaki, engineering science professor at the Toyonaka Campus of Osaka University. “Robots have hearts,” said Kokoro planning department manager Yuko Yokota. “They don’t look human unless we put souls in them. When manufacturing a robot, there comes a moment when light flickers in its eyes. That’s when we know our work is done.”

Public opinion in Japan may be more open to robots than in the West, where dark science fiction visions from movies such as “Bladerunner” and “Terminator” have conjured images of robo-soldiers taking over the world. “Japanese people have a friendly image towards robots,” said Toshiba’s Yoshimi.

Asada said Japan’s indigenous animistic belief system may also have readied people to accept human-like robots with minds of their own.  “Everything has a mind — the mind of the lamp, the mind of the chair, the soul of the desk,” he said, pointing at objects in his office.  Therefore the machines should have their mind too. If we proceed in this study, machines may have something like a human mind or ‘robo-mind’,” he said. [Breitbart]

Say for the sake of argument I had them build me a beautiful sex-bot with the mind of a chimp and the lithe, nubile exoskeleton of a 15-year-old.  Theoretically, would that be wrong?  I mean, the heart wants what it wants, and what it wants is a monkey-brained rape machine.

[hat tip: Cinematical]