I think you all are gonna find this...interesting (at least part is "new news". It seems surrogates, ala the Bruce Willis flick, are actually coming on faster than I at least had been aware of (and, per the flick, already looking younger and more fit than their "daddys"):
"Danish scientist Henrik Scharfe (gray suit foreground) demo'ed Geminoid-DK (seated in black suit), a shockingly realistic robot version of himself. While its movement and speech is limited, the robot's technology is likely to evolve quickly.
And so it seemed that it wasn't only in jest that Scharfe said, 'Ten years from now, I'll be at home having a beer in Denmark and the robot will come to TED to give a talk.'" --buried at the bottom of a CNN article on the TED conference
I find this has been advancing since about 2005...and that faux Henrik isn't the only one around...
"In the spring of 2010, a new geminoid was created. The new robot, Geminoid-F, was modelled after a young female (hence the name) and was a simpler version of the original HI-1.
Geminoid-DK is the 3rd in the geminoid series, and the first to be modelled after a Caucasian face. Geminod-DK was commissioned in 2010 at Kokoro, and completed in 2011.
Geminoid-DK is situated at Aalborg University in Northern Denmark.
I wonder how long it might be before "high value" humans (politicians, business tycoons, media types, religious figures) begin using such robots as a personal protection tactic when necessity dictates personal public exposure and accompanying threat?
The prospect of any sort of expansion (and perfection) of this tech certainly raises some interesting possibilities while speculating about what society in developed areas of the world may look like in a hundred years hence or so... I'll have to have a re-look at Bruce's flick i think.
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