Sophia, the ‘human’ robot was created by the Hong Kong based company Hansen Robotics in 2015 and was first shown to the public mid 2016. According to the company Sophia is the most advanced robot to date: ‘Sophia is an evolving genius machine. Her incredible human likeness, expressiveness, and remarkable story as an awakening robot over time makes her a fascinating front-page technology story’ (Sophia, 2018). But is this really the case?
Due to the appearance of Sophia on several talk shows (such as The Tonight Show), experts in the AI field started to heavily discuss the robot and her technology. On the one hand, Goertzel, the chief scientist at Hanson Robots explains Sophia as a platform, on which several applications can run. The three systems comprising Sophia are the Timeline editor, a sophisticated chat system and openCog. OpenCog is the system that Hansen expects to grow into AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Therefore, Hansen Robotics argues that Sophia is AI ‘in its infancy’ and will be at the forefront of AI development (Vincent, 2017).
On the other hand, some people argue that Sophia is just a marketing stunt to gain more attention from the general public. Facebook’s head of AI even goes as far as saying that Hansen’s staff members are deliberately deceiving the public by using Sophia as a ‘BS puppet’ (Urbi & Sigalos, 2018). Even though accusing Hansen Robotics of deceiving the public is wrong, the head of AI might be right in some way, since the only truly AI related aspect of Sophia is the OpenCog system.
AI (and in the future AGI) is developing at a rapid pace, regardless of the true nature of Sophia, therefore experts argue that the public needs a better understanding of AI to support this development. So even if Sophia partly is a marketing stunt, she might be doing good by starting the conversation about AI.
Sophia (2018). Retrieved from http://www.hansonrobotics.com/robot/sophia/.
Urbi, J. & Sigalos, M. (2018). The complicated truth about Sophia the robot – an almost human robot or a PR stunt. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/hanson-robotics-sophia-the-robot-pr-stunt-artificial-intelligence.html.
Vincent, J. (2017). Sophia the robot’s co-creator says the bot may not be true AI, but it is a work of art. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16617092/sophia-the-robot-citizen-ai-hanson-robotics-ben-goertzel.
