Robots of fiction and fantasy come alive in London's Science Museum

Gosh, aren't you shiny happy people. Hello, robot fans, we're here at the Science Museum in London to see the opening of the Robots Exhibition. We spoke to curator, Ben Russell. They key robots I wanted were undetermined. I thought, actually, what I can hold of? We had to go out and rely on borrowing and And new acquisitions and that sort of thing. We thought we'd concentrate on the humanoid robots. I realized early on that it's the humanoids that most fascinate people, because they're so much like us. So I thought, let's go for those guys. We have a lot of mobiles that have come in on loan to use from around the world, Japan, America, from other museums in the UK. So for example in the Bose museum a silver swan which is the most astonishing [INAUDIBLE]. When you start doing exhibitions you sort of go who's got what things and how likely are they to give them to us? I knew about the swan because the most remarkable machine, wow, and I thought they will never lend that to us. The museum [INAUDIBLE] don't ask, don't get. So we don't know how to try and amazing is they said, yes. And amazingly actually a gratifyingly high number of the people out there with robots, said yes when we asked them. So it's a really unique collection of objects actually. I'm really pleased with how its worked out. We subtly dodged the AI question cuz AI can be a very abstract and intangible thing and we said well when you book railway tickets or your flight to your holidays all of that sort of thing, that' basically AI and it's software. What's more interested from our point of view is embodied intelligence. Intelligence. So intelligence is okay but it's got to be in a vessel. And actually what is that form? Actually we say it tends to be humanoid form but how does that affect the trapping of intelligence within it? Now I think that's really where we are. In a way we were sort of so small virtually small niche in the whole realm of [INAUDIBLE]. But I think that's where the real challenges are. It's great but as soon as you get it into [INAUDIBLE] make it walk down some stairs. It's not going to work. We said a robot definition is a machine that looks life like or it behaves in a life like way. And we didn't want to [INAUDIBLE]. But have robots which were a bit more thought provoking than that and of course the interaction is one of the most you think wow. The interaction itself is amazing but if that interaction can then spark a bit of interest so people go away and think if robots are coming they're gonna escape from the lab how does that work? Then I think we've done our job well Here is the looking at you, kid. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]