Hiroshi Ishiguro
Roboticist
The Osaka University roboticist famous for building android copies of himself. He produced the “Future of Life” pavilion at Expo 2025, staging a future where humans and AI-driven androids coexist — and even evolve together.
In his words
Humans originally came from inorganic forms that became organic. We are trying to use the power of technology to evolve into new inorganic forms.
Biography
Hiroshi Ishiguro (born 1963) directs the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University and is the world’s best-known builder of humanlike androids. His Geminoid series — teleoperated doubles of real people, most famously of Ishiguro himself — and conversational androids like Erica turned the question “what is a human?” into an experimental research program, pursued jointly with ATR’s Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories.
Androids as the future of life
Ishiguro was theme producer of the “Future of Life” signature pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka, whose main exhibit, “50 Years into the Future,” filled scenes of daily life with androids and robots living alongside humans. The pavilion’s message is his lifelong thesis made concrete: as the gap between humans and robots narrows, human life gains possibilities — freedom from the limits of body, place, and time.
He goes further than most technologists: Ishiguro speculates that humanity may eventually use robotics and AI to shed its biological substrate entirely, evolving into “new inorganic forms.” Critics find the vision unsettling — his uncanny doubles are a staple of debates about the “uncanny valley,” and ethicists question androids that simulate emotion. Ishiguro’s reply has been consistent for two decades: building humanlike machines is how we come to understand humans.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/hiroshi-ishiguro