Iran’s robotics industry is fast becoming an online meme following a series of viral clips depicting a pair of so-called humanoid robots wearing kitchy costumes decorated with 0 and 1 binary code that turned out to be just humans in disguise. The fake robots might not have made such a big impact had they not been showcased at this year’s Kish Inox Tech Expo.
The “robots”, one man and one woman, presented themselves as advanced machines to visitors, but high-definition videos shot at the recent event reveal their obvious humanity through acne scars, blinking, breathing and unnatural robotic movements.
In one social media clip, the woman robot, who introduces itself as ‘Miss Data’, tells a visitor that it lives in “blockchain space” and that, together with its male counterpart, it is “a collection of data that works together in a shared data code.”
According to the Iranian website Zoomit, when confronted about the questionable robots, Hossein Afshin, a senior official in Iran for Science and Technology and Knowledge-based economy, said that they were the idea of a private company and had nothing to do with Iranian authorities.
“I only know that one of the companies did this for its own advertising. Consequently, it has no objection, and it must definitely accept its responsibility,” Afshin said. “This was not something that the policymakers of the Innotex Kish exhibition did, or it was not the exhibition’s idea to use humans as robots.”
We’ve seen fake robots used at tech Expos before, but these two were particularly bad, whereas the ones used in China a couple of years ago really captured visitors’ imagination. Heck, even this “robot waitress” was so much better.
