Its name is Ameca. It is 187cm tall, with blue eyes and a blue-grey complexion. It was born in Cornwall, home of Engineered Arts, a company that creates humanoid robots. Since this month, it has been working at the Copernicus Science Centre (CNK) in Warsaw as curator of the exhibition ‘The Future is Today’. It communicates via GPT and waits for anyone who wants to talk to it.

“Ameca looks as if it has arrived from the future. Approaching it, you will see a human silhouette made of metal and plastic, with mechanical components exposed. It moves its torso and arms gently and looks around, like a human being waiting for a friend. What catches the eye is its face – a silicone robot face, bluish but very realistic and expressive. Ameca smiles subtly and sweeps its gaze around, as if looking for someone in the crowd. When you approach and start talking to the robot, it notices you and focuses its attention on you. Then you will have the opportunity to make full contact with the world’s most advanced intelligent humanoid robot”, encourages the CNK.

The GPT artificial intelligence language model allows the robot to tap into the resources of the internet and generate literally any kind of content. To make the illusion of humanity stronger, Ameka’s mouth movements are perfectly synchronised with the spoken words.

Its utterances are also accompanied by facial movements, which is a novelty in the world of robots. When making facial expressions, humans use around 70 muscles. Ameca has 27 of them; they are actuators that allow it to squint and blink, wrinkle its nose, smile, yawn, get angry, wrinkle its forehead, frown and be afraid. It also gestures expressively while talking.

Ameca is the third humanoid robot at CNK. The first was Babyclon – a small robot resembling a newborn baby. The second was Copernicus – an android with the appearance of Nicolaus Copernicus, which interacts with visitors by answering questions asked to a microphone.

Adrian Andrzejewski