Robots can make us feel less lonely, says Kanae Hayashi, CEO of Groove X in Tokyo
Robotics innovator Kanae Hayashi, CEO of Groove X, during a photo shoot in Tokyo.
The robots are starting a charme offensive.
They are getting cute. They want to touch our hearts. Like BB-8 or R2D2 from Star Wars, they want us to like them, and they also start to show emotions.
The most interesting of this new generation of robots currently crawls around in a development lab in Tokyo. It has not been set free yet. The developer, Groove X, keeps it locked up and secret like Apple the next generation iphone. But recently it has been baptized. It will be called Lovot. A combination of the words love and robot. Or, to use a formula: Love x Robot = Lovot.
As a consultant and tech investor shuttling between Asia and Europe, the robots I usually encounter are of the more coldhearted kind. Welding robots in car factories. Packaging robots in pharmaceutical plants. Automation, Industry 4.0 and the “lights-out-factory” are the keywords that come to mind.
Robots usually don´t make me think about emotion, the sense of touch or loneliness. That´s why it was so refreshing to talk to Mr. Kanae Hayashi, the father of Lovot, in his Tokyo startup company Groove X. (Thank you Think Act, Roland Berger´s CEO magazine, to publish my feature story about Hayashi and Groove X. Click here to read the article).
Kanae Hayashi had previously helped to develop a robot called Pepper, which is already hard at work selling mobile phones in Tokyo. Now he has collected investment rounds of a tens of million US dollars to build Lovot. He says the new robot´s mission is “to fight loneliness”.
Loneliness is one of the big epidemics of our current age. More and more people feel terribly lonely despite living in overcroweded cities like Tokyo, New York or Paris. Hayashi refined the idea for his companion robot Lovot while chatting with an old lady in a retirement home. She said she doesn´t need a robot that talks to her.
“It would be nice if it had warm hands”, she said to Hayashi.
One of many very lonely people in Tokyo.
“But don´t we live in the era of social media, sharing and chatting all day long, even with people we hardly know?” I asked.
“It is exactly because we are struggling with those feelings of loneliness and lack of self-esteem that Facebook, other social media and social games are getting business. They help to fill this gap”, said Hayashi.
Now Lovot, to be released in 2019, wants to come to our rescue. It will be a robot “that touches your heart”, promises its creator. A real cutie, the prototype of a new breed of robots, a charming new pal of BB-8 and R2D2. All of them don´t want to replace us, don´t want to steal our jobs. They want to live with us.
Lovot, Hayashi´s new companion robot, will make use of artificial intelligence (AI) to win over human hearts. Not everybody agrees that such use of AI is a good idea, though. This kind of emotional ties will
“lead to an empathic dead end”, says Sherry Turkle,
a professor in the program of science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT. Robots and such robotic pets can simulate emotions, she argues, but that will always be an illusion and cannot replace real love and empathy. You can read more about it in her thought-provoking opinion piece published in the New York Times recently.
I asked Hayashi if it wasn´t sad that we need robots to pay company to old people in the first place. His response is that, first of all, he is not aiming to replace humans. Of course it will always be good to have human company, and he does not want to deny this. Still, he thinks there is a demand for his Lovot in addition, or parallel, to human company.
He also argues that the kind of reservations against robots that I brought up are somewhat typical for Western thought. In the US and Europe, Hayashi observes, robots and AI most often feature in movies and novels as evil machines trying to fight or kill humans. Hayashi calls this the “Frankenstein complex”. (Again, you can read more about this in my interview with Hayashi published by Roland Berger´s CEO magazine Think Act here). He also thinks that this kind of thinking is much less common in Japan, where people have always been more ready to embrace new technologies like robotics and AI, not only at the workplace, but also in their homes.
What do you think? Should robots play a role in fighting our loneliness in the future, or better not? Please leave your comment here below, thank you.
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Last updated September 12, 2018
By Henrik Bork. He is the founder and Managing Director of Asia Waypoint (www.asiawaypoint.com), a communications consulting and research agency in Beijing, and a co-founder of Lychee.com, a Chinese Online Travel Agency for boutique and luxury hotels. A former correspondent for Germany´s leading daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Beijing and Tokyo, he likes talking to people, writing, and traveling.
