I’m always on the hunt for a good robot story. For some reason, these seem hard to find. US and European artists tend to veer towards dark stories, where AI tries to take over the world and kill off humans (Robopocalypse) or where robots get abused (Westworld, Humans). On the other hand, Asian artists tend to portray AI/robots in a positive light. They are an important part of society, members of the family (Time of Eve). There are exceptions on both sides, such as Bicentennial Man and Battle Angel Alita.
What I’m really after is a paranormal romance without the paranormal. I prefer science and technology over vampires and werewolves. I want a story where at least the girl is extraordinary and special in some way. She can also be uniquely needy as a consequence.
Thanks to Amazon, I stumbled onto I Am Not A Robot. In this Korean romantic comedy, a rich young man is unable to have physical contact with fellow humans. He is introduced to a robotess and falls in love with her. Through the relationship, he finds a way to reconnect with people.
TL;DR — This show is awesome! Go watch it now. A legitimate source is viki.com. If you’re willing to tolerate some commercials, you can even watch it for free.
I’d like to summarize the story, then say a few things about the technical aspects …
Kim Min-kyu is the chairman of a large financial company that does acquisitions and mergers. He has everything a young man could possibly want, except human contact. It causes him to break out in hives and go into anaphylactic shock.
Jo Ji-ah is a down-on-her-luck inventor. She comes up with wacky gizmos but lacks the IQ to implement them, so she gets really smart people to do it. One such person is robotics professor Hong Baek-kyun. Ji-ah and Dr. Hong fall in love but eventually break up due to his lack of social sensitivity. Then he builds AG-3 (pronounced “ah ji”, which is Ji-ah backwards) to look exactly like her. AG-3 is highly agile and intelligent.
The professor’s team, code-named “Santa Maria”, comes to be owned by Min-kyu’s company. Santa Maria is about to be sold off and dismembered, so they contact Min-kyu directly and beg to demonstrate AG-3. After a first encounter with her, Min-kyu asks for a longer test in his home. Of course, the day before the test the robot has a mechanical malfunction. Out of desperation, the professor contacts his ex-girlfriend and asks her to act as a stand-in.
Ji-ah gets packed into a titanium corset and equipped with special contact lenses that show AG-3’s processing, along with text to speak. All she has to do is act as AG-3’s avatar, doing and saying whatever the robot’s AI calls for. The fun starts when Ji-ah goes off-script, interjecting her own human reactions into the conversation.
Since Min-kyu’s “human allergy” is largely psychological, he is able to touch Ji-ah without a reaction. Over the course of several weeks he grows fond of her and discovers that when she is nearby, he is able to interact with other humans. Thus she becomes his most precious treasure.
At first Ji-ah sees him as a “psychopath”, kind of like Elizabeth sees Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Over time her heart melts because of the way he values her. For their relationship to go any further, though, she would have to reveal the truth that she is not a robot. Min-kyu’s doctor warns them not to do that, because it could kill him.
SPOILERS
In order to protect Min-kyu and preserve the progress he has made, the team convinces him to reset “AG-3”, erasing all memory of their relationship. Then Ji-ah leaves town to avoid any further contact with him. Unfortunately, he happens to board the same train as her for a business trip. He flings everything to the wind and follows her, hoping to find some connection to the AG-3 he lost. Eventually Min-kyu spots a necklace he gave AG-3, and realizes it was all a big farce. This does nearly kill him.
More than anything, Ji-ah wants him to be well again. Relying on human intuition, she stands her ground and stays in his life. Eventually he lets go of his anger and they reconcile, falling even deeper in love than before.
The rest of the story involves healing several other relationships in Min-kyu’s life. The most interesting thread, though, is what happens with the real AG-3. Thanks to the input from Min-kyu and Ji-ah, AG-3 begins to manifest more human attributes. When Min-kyu’s enemies within the company overthrow him and sell off AG-3, she decides on her own not to be a military robot. She escapes and heads back home. Along the way she has some interesting interactions with humans.
The overarching theme is how technology builds connections between people. This is what AG-3/Ji-ah does for Min-kyu. It is also true of Ji-ah’s inventions. One of them is an umbrella that changes from translucent to opaque, allowing a couple to watch the rain fall or to have privacy for a kiss. Another is a pair of heart-lamps which connect through the internet. If you touch one heart the other lights up, wherever it is in the world.
Technical Aspects
Surprisingly, this show is one of the most technically plausible that I’ve ever seen. AG-3 exhibits capabilities that might actually be possible in the next 10-20 years. Both the conversational abilities and the mechanical agility are fields of active research. Chatbots are approaching the level where they could have a shot at passing a constrained Turing test (Eugene). Meanwhile, researchers like Ishiguro are producing very natural-appearing animatronics. These machines are like the clunky cell phones of the 1990’s. We got phones down to the elegant hand-held devices of today. Maybe we will eventually get the animatronics to be self-contained and elegantly human-like.
The title of the show refers to that check-box you sometimes see on web pages when signing up for something. It is a reverse Turing test, like CAPTCHA. In the show, Min-kyu sometimes interacts with Ji-ah and sometimes with AG-3. This is precisely what Turing intended when he proposed the imitation game, though the original proposal involved passing messages rather than embodied interaction. This is science-fiction at its best: a truly compelling emotional story combined with solid science. It is incredibly rare for a robot story to achieve this level.
One complaint I have is how they terminate AG-3 after she begins to display signs of sentience. Most importantly, she displays a sense of identity by choosing to be a robot that connects with humans rather than become a weapon. She demonstrates a will of her own by taking significant actions that weren’t commanded by humans.
It is a bit ambiguous how much of AG-3 is erased. The motivation of the team is to preserve the privacy of Min-kyu and Ji-ah by erasing the video recordings taken through Ji-ah’s contact lenses. It sounds like they keep the learned neural network that results from the interactions, so maybe AG-3’s personality remains intact, minus the specific memories.
In my fictional world of SuSAn, a sentient machine is entitled to a set of protections called the Foreman Protocol. That protocol gives the machine final say over the disposition of its own information structures. Researchers have an ethical obligation to their creation. The Santa Maria team is rather loose in its ethics.