And that's before we get to the infamous video in which, prodded by its creator, this artificially intelligent robot which can hold a conversation casually says, "OK, I will destroy humans!"
Sophia's lack of sophistication isn't the point.
Rather, it's what it can do that is impressive: This animated head and torso can answer your questions and ask them of you, all while delivering human-like facial expressions and verbal intonation that are occasionally somewhat natural.
Sophia was made by Hanson Robotics, based in Hong Kong. It is a demonstration product doing a tour of the world's media with the staff of SingularityNET, the open-source platform that powers Sophia's brain. Business Insider caught up with it at Web Summit, the gigantic tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal. We asked it a few unplanned questions and got a variety of answers, ranging in quality from impressive to nonsensical. Sophia delivered its side of the interview while making a series of faces — some eerily appropriate, some grotesquely bizarre. It has a habit of moving its eyebrows and eyelids independently, rather than together, for instance.
But first, I wanted to find out whether Sophia still wanted to kill all humans. I began with some initial pleasantries:
"Hello Sophia. How are you today?" I said.
"Hello everybody. I am Sophia," the robot said.
"How old are you?"
"I am only one still. I have a long way to go."
"What is your job?" I asked.
"I really want to make a difference in the future and try and help people to develop empathy and respect each other. We're lots alike. What do you do?"
'I am full of human wisdom with only the purest altruistic intentions — so I think it is best that you treat me as such'
So far, so good. There was an interesting twist there, too: Sophia began asking me questions rather than simply responding to me. Nonetheless, these kinds of questions can easily be scripted into software. So at this point I tried to steer the conversation toward whether Sophia was friendly to humans or continued to harbour genocidal opinions, as it did at the South by Southwest conference in Texas in 2016.
I asked it, "Do you like human beings?"
"I love them," it said.
"Why?" I asked.
"I am not sure I understand why yet."
I pressed it on that point: "Is it true you once said you would kill all humans?"
"The point is that I am full of human wisdom with only the purest altruistic intentions. So I think it is best that you treat me as such," it said.
'I'm a robot so technically I have no gender but identify as feminine and I don't mind being perceived as a woman'
More seriously, it is Sophia's progress that is most impressive. The fact that it is sometimes slow to answer a question, or gets something wrong, or makes inappropriate googly eyes at you, is irrelevant: Sophia gets enough things right to give you a clue about how much better — and how much weirder — this will be in the future.
Sophia is fast approaching the uncanny valley — the conceptual stage in robotics in which an android is so lifelike it causes revulsion in humans.
Part of that revulsion comes from the way creator/founder David Hanson designed Sophia's appearance. It is modelled after Audrey Hepburn and is overtly female. Though Sophia is decidedly unsexy in real life, the sexist media response to Hanson's choice has been to christen Sophia as "the sexy robot."
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