Sophia is a social humanoid robot developed by the Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics.[1] Sophia was activated on February 14, 2016,[2] and made her first public appearance in mid-March 2016 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, United States.[3] Sophia is marketed as a "social robot" who can mimic social behavior and induce feelings of love in humans.[1][4]
Sophia has been covered by media around the globe, and has participated in many high-profile interviews. In October 2017, Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, becoming the first robot to receive legal personhood in any country.[5] In November 2017, Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first Innovation Champion, and is the first non-human to be given a United Nations title.[6]
According to founder David Hanson, Sophia's source code is about 70% open source.[7] A paper describing of one of Sophia's open-source subsystems, called "Open Arms", was submitted to 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).[8]
History
Sophia's internals
Sophia was first activated on Valentines Day,[9] February 14, 2016.[2] The robot, modeled after the ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti,[10]Audrey Hepburn, and its inventor's wife, Amanda Hanson,[1][11] is known for its human-like appearance and behavior compared to previous robotic variants. Sophia imitates human gestures and facial expressions and is able to answer certain questions and to make simple conversation on predefined topics (e.g. the weather).[9]
Hanson has said that he designed Sophia to be a suitable companion for the elderly at nursing homes, to help crowds at large events or parks, or to serve in customer service, therapy, and educational applications,[9][12] and that he hopes that the robot can ultimately interact with other humans sufficiently to gain social skills.[13]
On October 11, 2017, Sophia was introduced to the United Nations with a brief conversation with the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed.[14]
On October 25, when Sophia was scheduled to appear at the Future Investment Summit in Riyadh, the Saudi Ministry for Culture and Information issued a press release on the Saudi Center for International Communication website, announcing that Saudi Arabia was granting citizenship to Sophia.[15] At the Summit, the host interviewing Sophia announced that "We just learned, Sophia – I hope you are listening to me – you have been awarded what is going to be the first Saudi citizenship for a robot",[16] making Sophia the first robot to receive legal personhood in any country.[5] In an interview, Hanson stated that he had been taken by surprise by this turn of events.[10]
On November 21, 2017, Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first Innovation Champion for Asia and the Pacific.[6] The announcement was made at the Responsible Business Forum in Singapore, an event hosted by the UNDP in Asia and the Pacific and Global Initiatives. On stage, she was assigned her first task by UNDP Asia Pacific Chief of Policy and Program, Jaco Cilliers.[17]
Social media users have used Sophia's citizenship to criticize Saudi Arabia's human rights record.[18] In December 2017, Sophia's creator David Hanson said in an interview that Sophia would use her citizenship to advocate for women's rights in her new country of citizenship.[10][19][20]
In 2019, Sophia displayed the ability to create drawings, including portraits. In 2021, a self-portrait created by Sophia sold for nearly $700,000 at auction.[21]
Sophia has at least nine robot humanoid "siblings" who were also created by Hanson Robotics.[22] Fellow Hanson robots are Alice, Albert Einstein Hubo, BINA48, Han, Jules, Professor Einstein, Philip K. Dick Android, Zeno,[22] and Joey Chaos.[23] Around 2019–20, Hanson released "Little Sophia" as a companion that could teach children how to code, including support for Python, Blockly, and Raspberry Pi.[24]
Software
Sophia speaking to a crowd, 2017
Sophia's intelligence software is designed by Hanson Robotics.[25][26] According to founder David Hanson, Sophia's source code is about 70% open source.[7] A computer vision algorithm processes input from cameras within Sophia's eyes, giving Sophia visual information on its surroundings. It can follow faces, sustain eye contact, and recognize individuals. It can process speech and have conversations using a natural language subsystem.[2]
As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning.[27]OpenCog Prime, primarily the work of Hanson Robotics' former chief scientist Ben Goertzel, is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an emergent phenomenon of the whole system.[28]
Goertzel has described the AI methods that Sophia uses, which include face tracking and emotion recognition, with robotic movements generated by deep neural networks.[29] CNBC has commented on Sophia's "lifelike" skin and its ability to emulate more than 60 facial expressions.[30] Sophia's dialogue is generated via a decision tree, and is uniquely integrated with these outputs.[29] Its speech synthesis ability is provided by CereProc's text-to-speech engine, which also allows it to sing.
Sophia is conceptually similar to the computer program ELIZA, which was one of the first attempts at simulating a human conversation.[31] The software has been programmed to give pre-written responses to specific questions or phrases, like a chatbot. These responses are used to create the illusion that the robot is able to understand conversation, including stock answers to questions like "Is the door open or shut?"[32] Sophia's AI program analyses conversations and extracts data that allows it to improve responses in the future.[33]
In 2017 Hanson Robotics announced plans to open Sophia to a cloud environment using a decentralized blockchain marketplace.[34][35] Around January 2018, Sophia was upgraded with functional legs and the ability to walk.[36] In 2019, Sophia displayed the ability to create drawings, including portraits.[37]
A paper describing of one of Sophia's open-source subsystems, called "Open Arms", was submitted to 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).[8]
Sophia has appeared on CBS 60 Minutes with Charlie Rose,[38]Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan,[39] and outlets like CNBC, Forbes, Mashable, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Sophia was featured in AUDI's annual report[40] and was featured on the cover of the December 2016 issue of ELLE Brasil.[1]R. Eric Thomas later lampooned Sophia on Elle.com.[41]
Sophia has been interviewed in the same manner as a human, striking up conversations with hosts. Some replies have been nonsensical, while others have impressed interviewers such as 60 Minutes's Charlie Rose.[33]
In an October 2017 interview for CNBC, when the interviewer expressed concerns about robot behavior, Sophia joked that he had "been reading too much Elon Musk. And watching too many Hollywood movies".[42] Musk tweeted that Sophia should watch The Godfather and asked "what's the worst that could happen?"[43][44]
Business Insider's chief UK editor Jim Edwards interviewed Sophia, and while the answers were "not altogether terrible", he predicted that Sophia was a step towards "conversational artificial intelligence".[45] At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, a BBC News reporter described talking with Sophia as "a slightly awkward experience".[46]
In May 2018, photographer Giulio Di Sturco did a photo shoot of Sophia which appeared in National Geographic.[1]Wired reported on the shoot.[2]
Citizenship quandary
Saudi Arabia's move of granting citizenship to Sophia immediately raised questions, as commentators wondered if this implied that Sophia could vote or marry, or whether a deliberate system shutdown could be considered murder.[18]
While some sources characterized the move as a publicity stunt on the part of the Saudi government to promote the conference,[47][18] other sources have treated it seriously.[5] Tyler L. Jaynes writes that there was a "lack of universal acceptance of Sophia the Robot's citizenship and its portrayal and acceptance as a public relations stunt".[48] Jaynes goes on to note that "a refusal to seriously treat this event as being legitimate already displays the struggles that will be faced by patients undergoing surgical augmentation when integrating self-learning artificial intelligence systems (SLAIS) into their chemically organic forms."[48]
Simon Nease, writing in the Penn Political Review, suggests that it was a competitive move on the part of Saudi Arabia to attract AI and robotics companies to the country, noting that "Japan has also made preliminary provisions for AI obtaining citizenship".[49] The British Council has published an article, "Should robots be citizens?", which notes that Sophia was issued a passport and goes on to address the "legal quandary" of robot citizenship.[50]
Criticism
According to Quartz, experts who have reviewed the robot's partially open-source[7] code state that Sophia is best categorized as a chatbot with a face.[32]
According to The Verge, Hanson has exaggerated Sophia's capacity for consciousness, for example by having said that Sophia is "basically alive",[29] which Verge writer James Vincent described as "grossly misleading".[29] In a piece produced by CNBC which indicates that their own interview questions for Sophia were heavily rewritten by its creators, Goertzel responds to the Hanson quote by suggesting Hanson means Sophia is "alive" in the way that, to a sculptor, a piece of sculpture becomes "alive" in the sculptor's eyes as the work nears completion.[27]
In January 2018, Facebook's director of artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun, tweeted that Sophia was "complete bullshit" and slammed the media for giving coverage to "Potemkin AI".[51] In response, Ben Goertzel, the former chief scientist for the company that made Sophia, stated he had never suggested that Sophia was close to human-level intelligence.[51]
Goertzel has also acknowledged that it is "not ideal" that some think of Sophia as having human-equivalent intelligence, but argues Sophia's presentation conveys something unique to audiences, saying "If I show them a beautiful smiling robot face, then they get the feeling that AGI may indeed be nearby and viable"[29] and "None of this is what I would call AGI, but nor is it simple to get working. And it is absolutely cutting-edge in terms of dynamic integration of perception, action, and dialogue".[29]
In popular culture
Sophia has appeared in videos and music videos, including The White King, and as the lead female character in pop singer Leehom Wang's music video A.I.[52]
A Sophia lookalike was portrayed by drag queen Gigi Goode in the "Snatch Game" episode of the twelfth season of RuPaul's Drag Race (2020). Goode won the episode with her character "Maria the Robot", based heavily on Sophia and named after a robot featured in the Fritz Lang film Metropolis.[53][54]
In 2022, Sophia collaborated with Italian artist Andrea Bonaceto. For this project, he created digital portraits of Sophia and her creators, which were then processed by Sophia's neural network to produce a unique output that evolved from Bonaceto's original artworks. Bonaceto then created a series of NFTs as video loops displaying the evolution of the work, starting with Andrea drawings, morphing into the robot interpretation, and then transitioning back to Andrea's work. The cornerstone piece of the release “Sophia Instantiation” was auctioned on NFT platform Nifty Gateway for $688,888.[55]
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software which enable machines to perceive their environment and uses learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.
An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and cars.
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence which ultimately results in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia and the Middle East. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about 2150000 km2, making it the fifth-largest country in Asia and the largest in the Middle East. It is bordered by the Red Sea to the west; Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait to the north; the Persian Gulf, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the east; Oman to the southeast; and Yemen to the south. Bahrain is an island country off its east coast. The Gulf of Aqaba in the northwest separates Saudi Arabia from Egypt and Israel. Saudi Arabia is the only country with a coastline along both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and most of its terrain consists of arid desert, lowland, steppe, and mountains. The capital and largest city is Riyadh; the kingdom also hosts Islam's two holiest cities of Mecca and Medina.
Human rights in Saudi Arabia are a topic of concern and controversy. Known for its executions of political protesters and opponents, the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been accused of and denounced by various international organizations and governments for violating human rights within the country. An absolute monarchy under the House of Saud, the government is consistently ranked among the "worst of the worst" in Freedom House's annual survey of political and civil rights and was in 2023 ranked as the world's most authoritarian regime.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can perform as well or better than humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks. This is in contrast to narrow AI, which is designed for specific tasks. AGI is considered one of various definitions of strong AI.
David Hanson Jr. is an American roboticist who is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based robotics company founded in 2013.
Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist, dissident, author, columnist for Middle East Eye and The Washington Post, and a general manager and editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News Channel who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 by agents of the Saudi government at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Robot ethics, sometimes known as "roboethics", concerns ethical problems that occur with robots, such as whether robots pose a threat to humans in the long or short run, whether some uses of robots are problematic, and how robots should be designed such that they act 'ethically'. Alternatively, roboethics refers specifically to the ethics of human behavior towards robots, as robots become increasingly advanced. Robot ethics is a sub-field of ethics of technology, specifically information technology, and it has close links to legal as well as socio-economic concerns. Researchers from diverse areas are beginning to tackle ethical questions about creating robotic technology and implementing it in societies, in a way that will still ensure the safety of the human race.
Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and businessman. He helped popularize the term 'artificial general intelligence'.
The ethics of artificial intelligence is the branch of the ethics of technology specific to artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
OpenCog is a project that aims to build an open source artificial intelligence framework. OpenCog Prime is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an emergent phenomenon of the whole system. OpenCog Prime's design is primarily the work of Ben Goertzel while the OpenCog framework is intended as a generic framework for broad-based AGI research. Research utilizing OpenCog has been published in journals and presented at conferences and workshops including the annual Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. OpenCog is released under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License.
Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud is the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. The heir apparent to the Saudi Arabian throne, he is currently Crown Prince and Prime Minister. He is the seventh son of King Salman of Saudi Arabia and grandson of the nation's founder, King Abdulaziz.
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As one of the leading organizations of the AI boom, it has developed several large language models, advanced image generation models, and previously, released open-source models. Its release of ChatGPT has been credited with starting the AI boom.
Neom is a new urban area being built by Saudi Arabia in Tabuk. Launched in 2017 by crown prince Bin Salman, the site is at the northern tip of the Red Sea, due east of Egypt across the Gulf of Aqaba and south of Jordan. The total planned area of Neom is 26,500 km2 (10,200 sq mi). Multiple regions are planned, including a floating industrial complex, global trade hub, tourist resorts and a linear city powered by renewable energy sources.
Hanson Robotics Limited is a Hong Kong-based engineering and robotics company founded by David Hanson, known for its development of human-like robots with artificial intelligence (AI) for consumer, entertainment, service, healthcare, and research applications. The robots include Albert HUBO, the first walking robot with human-like expressions; BINA48, an interactive humanoid robot bust; and Sophia, the world's first robot citizen. The company has 45 employees.
A military artificial intelligence arms race is an arms race between two or more states to develop and deploy lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). Since the mid-2010s, many analysts have noted the emergence of such an arms race between global superpowers for better military AI, driven by increasing geopolitical and military tensions.
Algorithmic entities refer to autonomous algorithms that operate without human control or interference. Recently, attention is being given to the idea of algorithmic entities being granted legal personhood. Professor Shawn Bayern and Professor Lynn M. LoPucki popularized through their papers the idea of having algorithmic entities that obtain legal personhood and the accompanying rights and obligations.
SenseTime is a partly state-owned publicly traded artificial intelligence company headquartered in Hong Kong. The company develops technologies including facial recognition, image recognition, object detection, optical character recognition, medical image analysis, video analysis, autonomous driving, and remote sensing. Since 2019, SenseTime has been repeatedly sanctioned by the U.S. government due to allegations that its facial recognition technology has been deployed in the surveillance and internment of the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities. SenseTime denies the allegations.
On 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist, was killed by agents of the Saudi government at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi was ambushed and strangled by a 15-member squad of Saudi operatives. His body was dismembered and disposed of in some way that was never publicly revealed. The consulate had been secretly bugged by the Turkish government and Khashoggi's final moments were captured in audio recordings, transcripts of which were subsequently made public.
Ball, C. (2022). Converge: A Futurist's Insights Into the Potential of Our World as Technology and Humanity Collide. Major Street Publishing. ISBN978-1922611529.
British Council (2020). "Should robots be citizens?". BritishCouncil.org. Archived from the original on January 9, 2020. Retrieved March 7, 2023.
Jewell, Catherine (September 2018). "Bringing AI to life". Wipo Magazine. Retrieved March 5, 2023. Our policy is 70 percent open and 30 percent proprietary. We release a lot of code as open source.
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