Scientists Invent Robot That Can Feel Pain Alike Those In ‘Blade Runner’
Video screenshot via Hisashi Ishihara (CC BY 4.0)
A Blade Runner-esque future might arrive sooner than you think. A team at Osaka University from Japan has created a robot that is able to feel affliction, in hopes to teach empathy to artificial intelligence.
The team inserted a touch and pain nervous system into the robot for it to become more “alive” and be able to understand human senses better.
The android flinches when an electric charge is applied to its “skin.”
The artificial pain system was presented through the form of ‘Affetto’, a hyper-realistic child robot manufactured by engineers back in 2018.
Lead researcher and president of the Robotics Society of Japan Minoru Asada is striving to get robots to process pain, and if that works, the team wants to see if “empathy and morality can emerge.”
Asada agreed that the synthetic humans seen in the 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner are getting closer to reality than one would think, as pain-sensing robots are currently undergoing research and development.
However, the team is focusing the use of these robots on Japan’s growing aging society, as they might be able to offer “physical and emotional assistance” to elders who live alone.
[via LADbible, cover image via Hisashi Ishihara (CC BY 4.0)]
Also check out these recent news
