BINA48: A Human Mind Cloned Into A Robot

Image Source: Hanson Robotics Inc. – An image of BINA48 showing the front of her face that looks completely like human and the back of her head showing all the chip set and processors.

Breakthrough Intelligence via Neutral Architecture, 48 Exa Flops per second processing speed and 48 Exa Bytes memory; in short, BINA48 was the name given to a robot by the scientists at Hanson Robotics.

David Hanson, who is an expert in the field of robotics, approached Martine Rothblatt, a lawyer by profession and a friend of David. After discussing many ideas, the concept of implanting a real human mind file into an artificial substrate was discovered in an attempt to build a cyber consciousness. Rothblatt then paid Hanson Robotics to create artificial intelligence using his wife, Bina Aspen Rothblatt, as the template.

Image Source: Hanson Robotics Inc. / Photographer: Max Aguilera Hedwig: Grey scale image showing work being done on the chip sets used for program BINA48

Currently the robot is kept at a nonprofit sister organization, named Terasem Movement Inc. or Terasem Movement Foundation which is in Bristol, Vermont with Bruce Duncan being the executive director.

“An imprint of a person’s consciousness can be created in a digital form, called a mind file, by collecting detailed information about that person. That information can then be expressed in a future, not yet created type of software, called ‘mindware,'” elaborates Duncan. “That same imprint of a person’s consciousness can be placed in a biological or technological body to provide life experiences comparable to those of a typically birthed human. BINA48 was created as an early demonstration of the transfer of information from a human being to a computer. Her mind file consists of Bina Rothblatt’s information – hypothesis one – and this glimpse of Rothblatt’s consciousness is expressed in limited terms by the android body BINA48.”

But all of this intelligence comes not without the help of internet, enabling her to express her point of view on politics to religion and commodities. There are 32 motors and sensors under her skin which allows her to express almost 64 different facial gestures. It uses a standalone microphone to hear, voice recognition software, dictation software, which allows improvement in ability to listen and retain information during a conversation, sees the world through 2 cameras and has facial recognition software to remember frequent visitors.

Image Source: Hanson Robotics Inc. – An image showing Albert Einstein Hubo’s head and a monitor with coding being displayed on.

That is not all for Hanson Robotics, they have also created ‘Albert Einstein Hubo’, which is a completely battery-powered, walking robot. They claim that it is the 1^st walking robot with human like expressions. Then there is Philip K. Dick, “In an unparalleled technical collaboration, a team of artists, writers, engineers, literary scholars, and freethinkers came together to create a lifelike, robotized portrait of Philip K. Dick. The robot was featured at WIRED magazine’s ‘Next Fest’. The robot portrayed Dick in both form and intellect through an artificial intelligence driven personality. The hardware manipulated Hanson’s proprietary lifelike skin material, to affect extremely realistic expressions using very low power (1/20th of the energy expenditure of other available technologies). Like BINA48, it has cameras in the eyes that allowed the robot to perceive people’s identity and behavior through advanced machine vision and bio metric identification software. The robot was able track faces, perceive facial expressions, and recognize people from the crowd after a limited period of interaction,” claims Hanson Robotics.

Here is the interview with BINA48:

However the best-selling author and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, famously pins 2045 as the year of ‘singularity’ – when computers fully gain human intelligence, and we begin to overlap. After that, he thinks computers will surpass us. After all, they can already compose concertos, compete on jeopardy, help cure diseases and teach classes – things we once reserved for the intelligent class of our time.

SOURCES:

https://www.lifenaut.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/You-Robot-1.pdf

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