several gifted Korean engineers from a company called Hanson Robotics gave a possible answer by asking a better question:
- Why don't we revive the old Einstein? (WMV video)
Click the link above to see the final stages of the project. Anatomical pictures are here. The engineers decided that the body was not too important - what matters is Einstein's brain (plus face, to make a good package). They replaced the body by a robot.
Everything has worked fine so Prof. Albert Einstein, nicknamed Albert HUBO, could meet with the president of the United States of America. It is widely believed that Hon. George W. Bush has convinced Prof. Albert Einstein to oppose the attempts of Einstein's colleagues to force Bush to take the nuclear option off the table. HUBO said that the Iranians could be working on the same bomb.
Click the photograph above or here to see a directory with many other photographs. Einstein's robotic brother ASIMO supervised by Koizumi, the prime minister of Japan, has met the former Czech prime minister Špidla in 2003 and demonstrated that Špidla was a sourball. See here.
So far, Prof. Einstein, much like Honda's ASIMO, only knows how to walk, serve tea, and compute spin foam amplitudes, so it is not terribly useful. But they hope to teach Einstein quantum mechanics and bosonic string theory next week and how to climb stairs in a few years.
Meeting a robot in 1999
In 1999 or so, when I was at Rutgers, I met a robot in the Busch campus dining hall. He came to us, shaked my hand and we talked about everything - including Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. His voice was a typical computer voice equipped with a very authentic human intonation. He was so interesting and smart! The debate was much more meaningful than most debates with various loop quantum gravity people and many others. I was stunned: have they already succeeded to create artificial intelligence that exceeds not only 90% of people but also many senior professors?
The answer was mysterious for half a day. Later I could re-check that it was a "synthetic personality" that was remotely controlled by a human being from about 50 meters. The human being could see through the robot's eyes, and he could control the motion and submit his speech that was transformed into the computerized voice color.
