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 didn’t ask them to, nice men who you’re pretty sure you’ve never met make robots modeled after you.
That’s 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 won’t 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, “Are you stupid? This takes a lot of money. Do you even know how to do it? It’s really hard”
We don’t want to make assumptions about whether there are any real women in Ma’s life, but when it came to listing criticisms he’d heard about this project, “Wow, that’s uhhh kinda creepy, ya know?” wasn’t 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, Ma’s robot, with blonde hair and hazel eyes, can form detailed facial expressions.
How detailed? Well, when you tell her she’s pretty, she winks and says, “Hehe, thank you.”
Just, perfect.
