Soul Machines: Can AI have a body?

In this episode of the show, I sit down with Dr. Mark Sagar to talk about his vision of an embodied form of AI.

Dr. Sagar is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Soul Machines, a company investigating how to use natural language processing with hyper-realistic visuals to create autonomously animated, emotionally dynamic Digital People. In addition to developing new technologies, the research seeks answers to big questions: should we be humanizing AI? How does feeding AI socio-emotional context help create rich, multimodal humanlike experiences, and at what point are we teetering on sentience? And what is really at stake the intersection of human cooperation with intelligent machines?

Dr. Mark Sagar is currently Director for the Auckland Bioengineering Institute's Laboratory for Animate Technologies. He is a two-time Oscar winner, in the categories of scientific and engineering awards, for his work creating realistic digital characters for the screen. The technology has been used in Spider-Man 2, Superman Returns, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar. The technology he created emerged out of his research, completed in the late 1990s, in a landmark study that explored how to develop an anatomically correct virtual eye and realistic models of biomechanically-simulated anatomy. It was one of the first examples of how believable human features could be created on a screen by combining computer graphics with mathematics and human physiology.

 He is also the founder of the BabyX, a pioneering research initiative that  seeks to combine models of physiology, cognition and emotion with advanced lifelike CGI, in an attempt to create a new form of biologically inspired AI.

Dr. Sagar received his Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Auckland, and was a post-doctoral fellow at M.I.T. In addition to his recognition by the Academy Awards, Dr. Sagar was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2019.