Well, it seems like the future everyone keeps talking about is already here. A robot named Erica has been cast as an actress in a movie called b which will cost $70 million to produce.

I bet what you're thinking. Is the robot that advanced that it can play a role in a movie? Well, we don't know exactly. We'll have to wait until the movie gets launched in a couple of years.

First of all, it will play a robot in the movie (obviously), so even if it is not advanced enough to "act" well, it won't make much of a difference as the general public knows that robots are not advanced enough to talk like humans.

Secondly, its makers say that they have explicitly programmed acting skills and facial expressions in the robot. So, it was built to be an actress. Maybe it can pull it off after all.

Future of Movies?

In recent times, there has been a lot of talk about robots taking up human jobs causing mass unemployment. As robots get more and more advanced to do our jobs a lot better than us and at a fraction of the cost, I think this is the inevitable future.

Erica maybe the first sign of robots coming to the movie industry. Currently, they can only play roles of robots in a movie but in the future, when they become so advanced that they become virtually indistinguishable to us, they might even start playing roles of real humans.

That would be a trippy experience. Imagine being impressed by an actor's acting skills in a movie and later getting to know that it was a robot all along! This is what we might get to experience in the future.

For now, this can be seen as something of an experiment. Sure, they could have simply used CGI but this could be a step towards seeing what robots are really capable of and might serve as an excuse for inventors to make robots as real as humans.


Image Credits: National Geographic