By Ben
Here’s your chance to be the literal face of a robotics company.
A tech firm is looking for the right person to lend their likeness to a new line of robot assistants for the elderly. And while it might sound like the plot to a bad sci-fi flick, the company will pay the chosen candidate about $130,000 for the privilege.
The privately funded firm has opted to remain anonymous due to the project’s “secretive nature,” but they have hired robotics recruiter Geomiq to find the right face for the job, reports the Mirror. Ideal applicants will possess a “kind and friendly face” for the prototype, per the head, er, face hunter’s recruitment ad. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the right person; let’s hope we can find them,” said a Geomiq spokesperson.
The lucky winner of the face-off will have their likeness reproduced on thousands of “virtual friends” — à la Will Smith’s disturbing 2004 movie “I, Robot” — as well as rake in the aforementioned big bucks. The project has been five years in the making.
Designers haven’t disclosed much beyond that, only that the robotic doppelgängers will hit the assembly line next year and will be “readily available to the public” upon completion.
On the application page, Geomiq acknowledges that licensing one’s visage to an unnamed robotics company for eternity is “potentially an extremely big decision.”
The face-cloning campaign has drawn flack from social media skeptics, with many of them analogizing it to bad dystopian movie tropes. Janelle Monáe “warned us about this,” cautioned one.
Others wondered why a supposedly tech-savvy robotics company needed a human face at all and couldn’t just save money by using an online random-face generator. “Have these people ever heard of GANs?” asked one Twitter techie. “There are datasets with 100k realistic (but not real) faces available already.”
