Mercedes-Benz also has its own humanoid robot, which already works in the factory, is called Apollo, adding to the list of 2024 humanoid robots, oversonic robe, or figures 2 figures. But I don’t want to talk to you about this. Rather: why are humanoid robots so humanoid? For more than practical psychological reasons. Certainly not because having five fingers is better than having six or eight, or two arms better than having three, or that walking on two legs is ideal.
In reality, what we are, is a long process of evolution, not to be understood from the best to the worst (on the misunderstandings regarding how the evolution I wrote in the newspaper on the occasion of Darwin Day is misunderstood) but how the organisms have adapted for random mutation and natural selection. At a certain point, six hundred million years ago, a small animal was at the origin of all vertebrates, and those with five fingers survived.
The wings of the birds are supported by a skeleton of five elongated fingers. There are five fingers also in the skeletons of the whales (one day I had to intervene at school to speak with the teacher of my daughter, who had told her fingers in the whales and had replied “but the whales do not have their fingers, have fins”, I waved them in front of a photo of whale skeleton), there are five fingers also eliminated those that act as a frame to the wings of the bats, and the same mathemat Based on the tens because we have ten fingers, all of us vertebrates that we descend from that small ancestor in the municipality of six hundred million years ago.
That organism with five fingers survived by natural selection, that is, in competition with others, it was the most efficient, but genetic mutations are random. The most efficient among others, not the most efficient ever. The most suitable, not even the strongest.
So why do the engineers, who build robots not surprisingly, as happens in nature, but selecting what they want, do them similar to us? It is for ourselves, a form of reassurance, and also a mental ease of interaction. As Giorgio Vallortigarara explains “it is we who respond to the signs of animation set in our brain, selected on the basis of the creatures who live in the planet, because we prefer to have live things next and better if similar to us”.
In movies things go differently: for example in Matrix the robotic machines that have taken the command are monstrous, with mechanical tentacles and many eyes, but inside Matrix take human forms (while for example the agent Smith could take any form). In the first terminator, the Android played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the T-800, has human appearance to get confused among other humans, but already in the second, having to interpret a good T-800, to the bad, the T-1000, the possibility of taking any form is given, and when it makes it it becomes much more disturbing. Stanley Kubrick’s Hal was not a robot but a perfidious Ai, and to make it somehow threateningly he did it as a single red eye that looks at you. (Among other things, I don’t know if you know, but by moving a letter forward every Hal letter you get IBM …).
The same thing goes to the head and face. There is no reason why a robot must have two placed cameras where we have eyes, and not three, or four, or even behind the head (not even that it has a head).
But we try to make them cute, resembling people we would like to deal with. That then for me, who are misanthrope, they would be more interesting than people even if they had an eye in the middle of the chest, but I am a separate pathological case.