Building artificial humans to understand humans

Abstract

If we could build an android as a very humanlike robot, how would we, humans, distinguish a real human from the android? The answer to this question is not simple. In human-android interactions, we cannot see the internal mechanism of the android, and thus, we may simply believe that it is a human. This means that humans can be defined in two ways: By their organic mechanism and by their appearance. Further, the current rapid progress in the development of artificial organs makes this distinction confusing. The approach discussed in this paper is to create artificial humans based on humanlike appearances. The developed artificial humans, an android and a geminoid, can be used to understand humans through psychological and cognitive tests. We call this new approach to understanding humans "Android Science."