Japan's newest museum guides are robots

Japan's newest museum guides are robots
(Image credit: Twitter.com/TPM)

Robot overlords have officially taken over Japan.

At the National Museum of Emerging Science in Tokyo, human tour guides have been replaced with human-like robot women. The Associated Press reports that a group of university professors, who are robotics experts, created the robots to learn more about human interaction.

"Making androids is about exploring what it means to be human, [and] examining the question of what is emotion, what is awareness, what is thinking," Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University who has been developing robots for more than 20 years, told the AP.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The life-size robots, which have silicon skin and even artificial muscles, can speak in a variety of voices, read the news, and respond to human conversation. Ishiguro predicts that as time progresses, robots will become a part of everyday human life. --Meghan DeMaria

Explore More

Meghan DeMaria is a staff writer at TheWeek.com. She has previously worked for USA Today and Marie Claire.