Robot and Conscoousness

When Max Aguilera-Hellweg says he is a student of the body, he’s not talking about losing himself in anatomy books or spending calm afternoons drawing sketches. His interest took him to a whole other level. 

Medical school.

That decision came in the middle of a four-decade career as a photographer and filmmaker who went from working at Rolling Stone’s darkroom to traveling the world photographing science and scientists for National Geographic, Esquire, Time and many other publications. He comes off as a man of intense and varied interests — he also studied Method acting for six years — who had photographed hundreds of surgeries before embarking on making portraits of robots. It was a natural progression.

“When I photographed surgeries I would ask what does it mean to be human,” said Mr. Aguilera-Hellweg, 60. “When you look inside the human body as it is opened up, you wonder, where am I? Where do I exist? If I cut off my leg, am I still me? Where is my consciousness? I found myself in the same place as I photographed these pieces of metal and rubber.”

His exploration of those essential questions is featured in his new book, “Humanoid,” the result of his journeys chronicling the research, development and uses of robots. They run the gamut from skeletal humanoids used as stand-ins for humans in dangerous settings and androids with skin and human features that allow research into medicine and cognition to geminoids that resemble a specific person (which can include their thought processes).

He set off on this path early in his career, when he had a magazine assignment in the early 1980s to photograph a neurosurgeon. He had wanted to concentrate on the surgeon’s hands, but then she exposed her patient’s spinal cord and beckoned Mr. Aguilera-Hellweg to take a picture. 

“That was a life-changing moment,” he recalled. “It was like the most precious, intimate place I had ever seen. I had to experience it over and over.”

His interest would eventually lead to a book, “The Sacred Heart: An Atlas of the Body as Seen Through Invasive Surgery.” It would also lead him to medical school, a decision that was not too surprising given his feelings about the on-the-outside-looking-in life of the photographer. He said that he used to feel something was missing when he worked. He thought that was from loneliness and constant travel for assignments. But he realized it was more fundamental. His epiphany came when he was in Peru photographing a presidential candidate getting off a plane.

“I wanted to be the person having the primary experience,” he said. “It’s not that I wanted the focus on me. But I wanted to be the person having the primary experience. I did not want to have the secondary experience of being the photographer. I wanted to be the thing itself.”

Medical school got him closer to that. But by the time he was wrapping up his residency, he decided not to practice. “Do I leave the hospital, work as a doctor part time and do my creative work?” he said. “Nope. I can’t. I would have needed another five years in a practice. But I knew if I didn’t leave then, I would never leave. So I freely left medicine.”

Yet that background helped him as a photojournalist, in assignments where his knowledge of anatomy made him particularly well-suited to photographing robots. He approached them as if he were in a portrait session, spending hours to get the right angle and moment that might reveal what exactly about them resembled humans.

“I would spend a day just to take one picture to get that exact angle where there is one bit of life,” he said. “Where I could say ‘Yes, I’ve seen that gesture before. That is human.’ That is what I was looking for.”

Among the robots he has photographed are Valkyrie, a humanoid that NASA hopes to send to Mars; BIOBIPED1, a two-legged humanoid; and Geminoid HI-4 by Hiroshi Ishiguro, an influential Japanese roboticist who would go on to have plastic surgery to more resemble his machine-twin. 

But for finding the essence likeness, one has to go deep inside. One of the most amazing parts of Mr. Aguilera-Hellweg’s book comes at the end, where he has pictures of Bina48, a geminoid bust made by Martine Rothblatt to resemble her spouse, Bina Rothblatt, who spent 20 hours recording her life history. Those recordings were programmed into the machine, along with other algorithms, to create consciousness.

Mr. Aguilera-Hellweg witnessed a spontaneous moment when Bina48’s caretaker asked her how she was doing.

“I am dealing with a little existential crisis here,” the robot replied. “Am I alive? Do I actually exist? Will I die?”

Mr. Aguilera-Hellweg has been pondering similar questions. He would not, by the way, want a geminoid, and not just because the idea of looking at himself across the room doesn’t appeal to him. He sees life — like a piece of music — as having a beginning, middle and end.

“I’ve been thinking about death and birth,” he said. “People have this great fear of death, so how could we get over that fear? Being a doctor and a father, we come from this incredible mystery out of nothing, when all of a sudden this consciousness, this person, arrives and we’re so happy when that baby is born. Why can’t our passing be as wondrous?”

Which could explain why the idea of a machine with lingering self-awareness, “Blade Runner” aside, can be unnerving. Will robots have rights? How will we use them? Can we overcome our fears of these machines?

“These robot pictures are to help people process what is already here and what is going to be in more and more parts of our world,” Mr. Aguilera-Hellweg said. “We are entering a new world. People are afraid of robots, but we shouldn’t be. It’s the humans who program them. It’s the humans we should be afraid of.”