Meet the First AI Robot Based on a Living Human

PARK CITY, Utah—Science-fiction and technology have long influenced each other, and those dynamics are at the heart of Love Machina, director Peter Sillen’s documentary (which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival) about the romance of visionary entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt and her wife Bina, which is so strong that the two have sought to devise an artificial means of remaining together forever. Enter Bina48, a robot bust modeled after Bina that’s powered by AI and uploaded with “mindfiles” (i.e., large data packets of photos, videos, writings and audio recordings) that are meant to help this contraption develop an eternal Bina-esque digital consciousness. Manufactured by the Rothblatts’ Terasem Movement Foundation, it’s the centerpiece of their efforts to achieve immortality, and a machine that seeks to make past fantasy into future reality.

If this sounds crazy, it looks just as bizarre, as evidenced by Love Machina’s opening images of Bina48, whose gray-haired head turns and facial features move with the stilted unnaturalness of a primitive apparatus. That Bina48 resembles a somewhat distorted version of its human counterpart only makes it creepier, as does its halting speech patterns in Bina’s voice. These shortcomings, however, are superficial; the main thing about Bina48 is that it uses tremendous AI computing power to answer questions and state opinions with a relatively impressive degree of depth and thoughtfulness. It isn’t a convincing replica of Bina, but in most respects, it far outpaces Siri and Alexa—a not-inconsiderable feat considering that it was designed in 2007, years before those digital assistants became ubiquitous components of modern life.

Martine and Bina think that transferring human consciousness into a robot is a legitimate possibility on the not-too-distant horizon, and their motivation for doing it is their undying affection for each other. Love Machina is, first and foremost, a portrait of the intensely committed couple and their desire to continue being “two bodies, one soul, forever in love” (they even refer to themselves as “Marbina,” including on their vanity license plate). Martine and Bina met at a Hollywood disco when they were both single parents with one kid, and they immediately clicked. They married, adopted each other’s children, and had two more of their own, all as Martine became phenomenally successful in the satellite communications field, eventually creating Sirius XM radio. In 1994, their daughter Jenesis was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, and in response, Martine founded United Therapeutics and produced a new drug that allowed Jenesis and tens of thousands of others to live with their condition.

New York magazine writer Lisa Miller (who profiled her) admits that Martine’s formidable professional reputation has made people pay attention to her more peculiar ideas, and as Love Machina illustrates, some of them are decidedly off the beaten path. Bina48 is at the top of that list. The first robot AI based on a living human, it’s a marriage of the organic and the mechanical that’s an example of Martine’s lifelong belief in transcending boundaries, be they related to gender (she’s a trans woman who transitioned in her forties), race (Martine is white and Bina is Black), or flesh and consciousness (via Bina48). She additionally imagines that humanity is destined to one day leave the Earth in order to become a part of the galaxy—a notion based on proposals for human space colonies forwarded by physicist and activist Gerard K. O’Neill—and is a fan of Google’s director of engineering Ray Kurzweil, who claims that by the 2030s, we’ll be implanting nanobots into our brains in order to connect with the cloud and achieve a profound intelligence known as the ”singularity.”

Love Machina reveals that some of Martine and Bina’s convictions and grand designs come from science-fiction; the name “Terasem” is a Latin translation of “Earthseed,” as in the Earthseed book series by Octavia Butler, and Martine cites Arthur C. Clarke and Star Trek as formative influences. When asked what they would do if one of them were to prematurely die, Bina says that she’d head straight to cryonics company Alcor, at which point the film stops to spend a bit of time with Michael Perry, who was recently featured on HBO’s How To with John Wilson. Director Sillen presents Perry as a true-believer but leaves out the fact that he willingly castrated himself—a calculated omission designed to legitimize him and, by extension, all of the futurism promoted here.

Martine and Bina’s concept of using mindfiles to recreate people in a digital realm is similar to the strategies being pioneered by the men and women spotlighted in Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You. Whether the goal is to prolong life or resurrect the deceased, these trailblazers are convinced that AI is the magic tool that will eliminate death—a perspective that Bina48 overtly articulates at one point. Devoid of any outside voices, however, Love Machina is rather unconvincing on most counts. In new and archival interviews, Martine and Bina gush over one another with a slushiness that’s borderline off-putting, and by the time Martine is showing off the antennas that are used to perform “spacecasting”—the process by which mindfiles are transmitted into space like “messages in a bottle”—her credibility has been compromised by her faith in what comes across as far-fetched pseudoscience.

Love Machina’s scattershot structure does its subjects no favors, with the film taking a variety of meandering detours until its overarching purpose grows hazy. Martine and Bina’s romance often recedes into the background so others can pontificate about an exciting tomorrow in which the merger of humanity and AI will beget entirely novel forms of intelligence, life, and organization of matter. To avoid the “robot uprising” about which Bina48 jokes, various individuals state that advanced sentient machines must be “compassionate,” although given that no one even defines consciousness (apparently, it’s just an amalgam of old pictures and VHS home movies), this resonates as just comforting mumbo-jumbo. Stony Brook University professor Stephanie Dinkins raises the issue of race by noting that the Black Bina48 was largely crafted by white scientists, and then drops it and admits that “death” is what most draws her to the robot.

In the end, the film is a clutter of techno-theorizing that’s flimsily tethered to Martine and Bina’s love. That’s real, whereas so much of Love Machina is merely out-there conjecture.