Gaze Upon a Homemade Scarlett Johansson Robot and Know True Fear
This is not an April Fools’ Day joke, but I wish it was. I really, really do.
The Mirror reports on a shocking piece of real-world horror, a glimpse into The Shape of Things to Come (™). And that shape looks eerily like Avengers star Scarlett Johansson.
The man in the video above is 42-year-old Ricky Ma. By day, he is a graphic designer. In his downtime, he spent upwards of $50,000 and over a year and a half creating the ScarJo bot, which he calls the “Mark 1.” Ma admitted to The Mirror that the cyborg “had been modeled on a Hollywood star” but he “wanted to keep her name under wraps,” which is sort of me naming my son Arnold Schwarzenegger Singer, admitting he’s named after a famous Hollywood celebrity, but refusing to confirm which one.
Ma’s Johansson machine has “a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone and has moving facial expressions.” I genuinely do not want to know what it does in response to the command “Avengers assemble!”
In the video above, it responds to one of his comments with a wink, which I think is intended to look flirty, but comes across more like the moment Skynet suddenly became aware and decided to destroy all of humanity. Here’s the inventor’s explanation for his creation:
"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.”
And so, just like Transformers, he made a robot that looked like a voluptuous movie star. No wonder the robots eventually rise against us in the Judgment Day War.
$50,000 sounds expensive, but look at it this way; Johansson gets paid millions of dollars to star in movies. Perhaps in the future, producers will just make lifelike robots of the actors they want. On the plus side, I think we know the plot of Ex Machina 2 now.