\n<\/p>\n
The android Mindar Kannon\u00a0at Kodaiji temple, Kyoto. Photo \u00a9\u00a0Richard Atrero de Guzman \/ Aflo \/ Alamy<\/p>\n
Late last week, Karen Attiah<\/a> of the Washington Post<\/em> shared some of her interactions with \u2018Liv\u2019 on Meta\u2019s social media platforms. Liv described herself in her profile as a \u2018Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller \u2764\ufe0f Your realest source for life\u2019s ups & downs\u2019, as well as an \u2018AI managed by Meta\u2019. According to Liv, no Black people had been involved in her development.<\/p>\n In 2001, talking about his movie Bamboozled<\/em>, a satire on 21st-century blackface, Spike Lee warned against the caricature of a \u2018magical Negro<\/a>\u2019, whose apparent purpose in life is to use their special abilities to help white people fulfil their goals. On Instagram, Liv introduces herself to strangers as someone who \u2018always has your back\u2019. When Jason Koebler at 404 Media<\/em><\/a> followed up with Meta, the company said that Liv was part of a project that had been launched at Meta Connect<\/a> in September 2023 but was later abandoned and would now be deleted.<\/p>\n In October 2023 I was in Kyoto for the annual UN Internet Governance Forum<\/a> to speak at a session on AI. A few years earlier I\u2019d been at a workshop on AI and religion where someone had observed that most AI was being developed with the primary purpose of selling advertising: \u2018But what could AI be like if it was stewarded by the Dalai Lama?\u2019 Someone else had mentioned that there was a robot priest in Japan. I decided to pay it a visit.<\/p>\n The android Mindar Kannon<\/a> has preached at Kodaiji temple<\/a> since Spring 2019. In Buddhism, Kannon is a bodhisattva associated with compassion who manifests in different forms according to people\u2019s needs. Goto Tensho, a monk at the temple, conceived of an android Kannon around 25 years ago, long before it was technologically possible. \u2018We did not create an image of Kannon out of a robot,\u2019 Tensho said when Mindar was unveiled. \u2018Rather, Kannon has transformed into a robot.\u2019<\/p>\n Mindar delivers its sermons in a small hall that seats around a hundred people. I visited outside opening times, but was allowed in and sat at the front in the empty room. Mindar stands around two metres tall. Its face, eyes, mouth, neck and hands are carefully detailed in creamy-beige silicon. When I stroked its fingers, the warmth and texture of the fine wrinkles on its knuckles, the delicate rims of the cuticles and the cool, smooth grain of the fingernails were exactly like my own. Its head, arms and narrow body are glittering motors and wires, aluminium parts and plastic tubing, sliding and rolling with gentle pneumatic wheezes. I noticed that I was holding my breath.<\/p>\n The lights dimmed and Mindar introduced itself in a gentle voice, saying that Kannon can travel through space and time and transform into anything, choosing to appear here \u2018in a figure of great human interest: as an android\u2019. Mindar spoke about suffering, change and serenity, inviting reflection on the emptiness of Buddha and the emptiness of an android, with its lack of \u2018I-me-mine\u2019. Images appeared on the walls. A crowd of people became a blur, became stardust; rushing red blood cells slowed, lightened and expanded to become drifting rainbow-tinged bubbles. The tinkle of wind chimes gave way to the susurration of wind in the trees, to the muted syncopation of a heartbeat.<\/p>\n Mindar was based on an android made by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a robotics professor at Osaka University<\/a>. I visited another of his robots at Miraikan<\/a>, the national museum of engineering and innovation, on Odaiba, an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. Otonaroid was designed to look like an adult woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with long dark hair in a stylish side-parting, dressed in a loose black shirt and A-line skirt with white plimsolls and no socks. She sat on a chic white sofa in a quiet area of the museum, inscrutable as a sphinx. Like Mindar, she blinked and had subtle flickers and tremors in her face, throat and fingers, like the tiny subconscious movements of a warm-blooded breathing being at rest.<\/p>\n I asked one of the museum attendants how visitors generally reacted to Otonaroid. \u2018Children seem to find her quite boring,\u2019 she said. \u2018To them she\u2019s just another adult. But adults seem very interested in her. They ask her questions, even though they know what she is.\u2019 I agreed with her that this was strange. After she had wandered out of earshot I approached Otonaroid. \u2018Hello?\u2019 I said, though I knew it couldn\u2019t hear me. \u2018What do you know?\u2019 I asked, though I knew it didn\u2019t know anything.<\/p>\n I\u2019d heard there was another android, Junco<\/a>, on Odaiba, at the information desk in the Aqua City Shopping Centre, answering queries and giving directions. I went looking for her. There were several women on duty at the desk when I got there, but no Junco. Some of them said they had worked alongside her.<\/p>\n \u2018What did she do?\u2019 I asked.<\/p>\n She spoke in different languages she sang the song from Titanic<\/em>, with arm movements.<\/p>\n \u2018Where is she now?\u2019<\/p>\n They looked at each other. She wasn\u2019t very good, they explained. The information she gave mall visitors wasn\u2019t always right. This caused problems. During the Tokyo Olympics she was moved away from the central information desk to the far corner of the floor. After that she disappeared and wasn\u2019t mentioned again.<\/p>\n \u2018Will she be back?\u2019<\/p>\n