The future is here and she walks with the fostering First Lady of America

Humanoid Figure 03 and Melania Trump. Screen shot: Bloomberg news/YouTube

It was really a matter of time until the First Lady of the warring United States is accompanied down a red carpet in the White House, not by her husband, but by a she-bot. On the second and final day of Mrs Trump’s Fostering the Future Together Global Coalition Summit, guests, comprising mainly of first spouses of our fractured world, were treated to a red carpet show that saw FLOTUS emerging from behind heavy wood doors with a new crony-chaperon. Both walked together, but the lanky humanoid with a waist smaller than her assigned master’s ambled ahead. She had the advantage of speed usually accorded to Donald Trump. Both (wo)man and machine were stiff, but while one was physically rigid, the other was emotionally fossilised. Unsurprisingly, social media users everywhere were confused and had to ask, “which is the robot?” A valid question that the White House has not responded to, yet.

The humanoid, as it turned out, was a product of the Silicon Valley startup Figure A. Their 3rd-gen grown-up beta-butler, with “pixels-to-action brain” and “human-like heel-strike”, is called Figure 03, a naming convention that beautifully suggests a lab in Sunnyvale than an atelier in New York. The third iteration of Figure is flat-chested and slender, but she does share the gait of The Iron Giant rather than AVA or the more current M3GAN. She has a glass ovoid for a face on which you can, at most, polish with Windex. Figure 03 speaks eleven languages and that flair was used to welcome the guests and to introduce herself. Hers was a voice that could have been a riff on the contestants of Wheel of Fortune, hoping to win a cruise to Puerto Rico. She was certain to notify that she was “made in the United States of America”, but conveniently left out the global material supply chain that made that possible: the rare earth likely from China and the specialised sensors and semiconductors from the rest of East Asia. Perhaps, she doesn’t want to burden her slightly more human companion with the ways of the world. The first lady was probably more concerned with America First.

A new holy trinity: Bridget Macron, Figure 03, Melania Trump. Photo: Reuters

Figure 03’s very public appearance, now seen across the world, was a stunning boutique display of minimalist ambition. This is striking in the wake of China’s own humanoid-pugilists, revealed during the chunwan (春晚) gala last month, performing advanced martial arts, doing backflips, and ‘duelling’ with kids. What Mrs Trump, “the visionary”, as she had called herself, showed was essentially a robotic greeter. That itself is a very old idea, a century-old hospitality script. In Japan, they have been using greeter-robots since 2015, when Henn Na Hotel in Nagasaki staffed its front desk with robots in the form of dinosaurs. One marketing consultant told us: “As far back as 2018, when I was in Sapporo, the hotel I stayed in was staffed by a robot concierge. You could even choose for it to speak English!” Members of the diplomatic corp will remember that even further back—2014 to be exact—one Honda ASIMO charmed world leaders, including Barrack Obama, at the Miraikan museum with not just greetings, but also running, hopping, and pouring drinks. Mr Obama even played soccer with ASIMO. About the same time. SoftBank’s Pepper robot was already a fixture in Japanese lobbies and cafes, specifically designed to “scan emotions” and provide the same patient interaction Mrs Trump is now meekly pitching for American schools.

The domestic dummy the White House proudly showed off was re-authored to seem new, but was more a retro tribute. FLOTUS announced that “the robots are here” and that “very soon artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility”. She later evoked Plato, imagining it as an AI-powered home tutor. There was a distinct, echoing distance between the syllables and her actual awareness. Calling a glorified receptionist a humanoid educator was charmingly optimistic. Just as her off-white suit was. You either saw Timothée Chalamet or someone about to board the Love Boat. She favours wide lapels, like a magician, and so the suit jacket sported them. A vision of tailoring precision, but with Figure 03, the optics was of companionship without the unpredictability of a human peer. At that chunwan performance that Spring Festival night, the robotic display ended with a humanoid reaching out to a boy for his hand. The kid took the bot’s, a litteral grasp of the future. Machine and man can indeed co-exist. By contrast, the visible and deliberate distance Melania Trump’s kept with Figure 03 showed America has a long way to go, with or without Plato.