Haven’t I seen you someplace before?
not make a full-time living as a painter. Creating humanlike robots became his way of continuing to ask questions about human souls and conscience.
“The difference is a canvas or a mechanical body,” he said. “Scientists or engineers need to be artists, because we need to find really new things.
“I am always thinking about artists as engineers, there’s no difference.”
Prof Ishiguro even hoped to find answers about human souls and conscience through his work.
“Neuroscience cannot reach that,” he said. “We need to have a mind, have a heart. So a conscience and soul, these are very important, and we believe in them, but no one has answered these questions. So my purpose is to answer these questions by using a robot.”
Prof Ishiguro said it was also easier for people to engage with a robot that looked like a human, rather than another object.
“The ideal interface for a human, is a human,” he said.
“Especially for short-term interactions, the human-like appearance works very well.” CROSSBENCH senator Nick Xenophon will push for new import laws to ban flammable cladding in the wake of London’s Grenfell Tower disaster.
A Senate inquiry into nonconforming building products has called for an urgent ban on the importation, sale and use of polyethylene core aluminium composite panels.
“The evidence we’ve heard is that putting this sort of cladding on high rise building is like wrapping a building in petrol,” Senator Xenophon said.
Fire retardant cladding only cost $2-$3 a square metre more, he said. Labor, which dominated the Senate committee, wants the government to stop buck-passing the issue to the states and territories which have control of building codes.