Philip K. Dick died in 1982, but the futuristic novelist lives on in a robot that its developer hopes will help ease the loneliness of aging. The animatron, covered with lifelike skin, buzzes and whirs as it arches its eyebrows and glances around the room. A microphone hears questions, and a built-in computer searches for keywords in those questions and responds with a sometimes-appropriate sentence or two. The words, spoken by a human voice, are pieced together from 10,000 pages of Dick’s writings that have been digitized and fed into the computer. Talking to it is not like talking to a human, but Texas businessman Dale Hanson hopes his social robot eventually will do an impressive imitation of a human. His idea is that a family can commission a robot that has familiar facial features and that contains reminiscences about the family’s past. The robot then would become one of the family, sharing stories and providing company to an aging parent, for instance. Hanson thinks the idea could work in countries with an aging population and relatively low birthrates such as the U.S. and technology-friendly Japan, where Hanson hopes to sell perfected robots for at least $100,000 each by the end of the decade. It’s an idea Philip K. Dick would have loved.
