Being a beautiful and high-profile woman sounds great, if you can get past all the objectification and the often criminal invasions of your privacy. Also, sometimes, even when you definitely didnât ask them to, nice men who youâre pretty sure youâve never met make robots modeled after you.
Thatâs what happened to Scarlett Johansson recently. The Mirror reports that a 42-year-old product- and graphic designer from Hong Kong named Ricky Ma dedicated $50,000 and 18 months to building a humanoid robot designed to look like a Hollywood star. Although Ma wonât specify which actress he had in mind for Mark 1 (the name he gave to the robot), it does look just enough like Johansson for her to maybe want to consider taking out a restraining order. How flattering!
Ma told the Mirror:
When I was a child, I liked robots. Why? Because I liked watching animation. All children loved it. There were Transformers, cartoons about robots fighting each other and games about robots. After I grew up, I wanted to make one. But during this process, a lot of people would say things like, âAre you stupid? This takes a lot of money. Do you even know how to do it? Itâs really hardâ
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We donât want to make assumptions about whether there are any real women in Maâs life, but when it came to listing criticisms heâd heard about this project, âWow, thatâs uhhh kinda creepy, ya know?â wasnât among them.
But why spend so much money to make a fake lady when there are real ladies all around? To make her better, of course!
Besides movements of its arms and legs, turning its head and bowing, Maâs robot, with blonde hair and hazel eyes, can form detailed facial expressions.
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How detailed? Well, when you tell her sheâs pretty, she winks and says, âHehe, thank you.â
Just, perfect.