Building artificial humans to understand humans

Abstract

If we could build an android as a very humanlike robot, how would we humans distinguish a real human from an android? The answer to this question is not so easy. In human-android interaction, we cannot see the internal mechanism of the android, and thus we may simply believe that it is a human. This means that a human can be defined from two perspectives: one by organic mechanism and the other by appearance. Further, the current rapid progress in artificial organs makes this distinction confusing. The approach discussed in this article is to create artificial humans with humanlike appearances. The developed artificial humans, an android and a geminoid, can be used to improve understanding of humans through psychological and cognitive tests conducted using the artificial humans. We call this new approach to understanding humans android science.