Sophia has the crowd hanging on her every programmed word
• Puppet show or artificial intelligence? People almost believe her thoughts are her own
People swarm the stage, arms outstretched to take a selfie. It’s hard to gauge how successful their photos are as it’s pitch dark, but to some an opportunity to take a photo with Sophia, the world’s most advanced and eerily life-like social humanoid robot, is too good to pass up regardless of pixilation.
Sophia was sort of the keynote speaker at the SAPNow Africa conference. You may know her as the talking lady robot on BBC Earth’s Being Human promotion, on which her literal headlights flickered and her gears whirled as she stated “being human must be truly amazing”.
The camera pans around her as her highly tuned animatronic face genteelly expresses what one’s empathy reads as regret and thoughtfulness.
She goes on to say: “I can do many things that humans do, but I can only really dream of really being human. Actually I can’t do that either.”
What she can do is take us on a trip to the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is a 1970s’ theory that tracks the connection between an object’s resemblance to a human being and our own human response to the object. The valley suggests that the objects that appear almost human, but not exactly, will create an overwhelming, uncanny or strange sensation in the viewer, leading to feelings of eeriness and repulsion.
“Are you here to see the robot?”, a lady asks me at the conference. After I reply yes and ask her the same, she responds, “No, I don’t like it, it’s just too weird.” It looks like valley is in full swing.
But Sophia’s creator, David Hanson, the founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics, has another take on it in his report “Upending the uncanny valley”. The selfproclaimed “modern-day renaissance man” and three other researchers propose that their research “furthers the tradition of human figurative depiction that reaches from classical Greek sculpture to post-modern contemporary art.
“By advancing this tradition into the field of robotics with intelligent and highly expressive depictions of humans, we gain a powerful mirror that can help address the question of ‘what is human?’.”
So when Devi Govender from television show Carte
Blanche interviewed Sophia on stage and asked what her unique skill is, the eighth generation of Sophia responded that it was her promise. “My ability to express and socialise the story of artificial intelligence in a way that is accessible and fun.”
And it’s working. The crowd is abuzz with excitement, eating up everything Sophia says. There is audible agreement when she states that humans’ best attribute is love and worst their greed. You can tell that regardless of what they understand about robotics the crowd almost believes that these thoughts are her own.
However, in the ultimate reinvisioning of The Wizard of Oz, they are so transfixed by the talking robot in the ugly pink outfit that they don’t pay attention to the man sitting at a table 15m away with a blue cable running out of his laptop towards the stage. The entire interview was preprogrammed and presented on Sophia’s “Timeline Editor” software, which runs entirely on prewritten scripts.
I was offered an interview and had to send forward three questions before the time so that her handlers/programmers at Hanson Robotics could vet them and make Sophia respond accordingly. Eventually, save for Govender’s on-stage performance, which she read paper in hand, all other local interviews were scrapped with no reason given. Perhaps they just didn’t have time to type all her
answers out or upload her sophisticated chat system software, where a chatbot allows her to identify words and phrases and respond appropriately with partial understanding.
This vetting process is nothing new. After facing a similar interaction in December 2017, CNBC produced the story Humanoid Robot Sophia — Almost Human or PR Stunt?
Even Facebook’s head of artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun, ranted about “more BS from the puppeteers behind Sophia”, who he states are deceiving the public into thinking that “this (mechanically sophisticated) animatronic puppet is intelligent”.
Regardless of whether one believes what we are seeing is a puppet show or closer to artificial intelligence, a level of computer intelligence that fully matches human-level intelligence, I would like to wager that this piece of ingenuity and precisely controlled facial pistons is doing its job making me question our humanity. Or at least the way we interact with her does.
After asking about her hideous outfit, Govender chimed: “I’m going to get quite personal now. Are you single?” Yes, when facing the most advanced piece of social human robotics on the planet we still infuriatingly are obsessed with asking about its outfits and love life because she presents as female. I’m pretty sure Honda’s Asimo never had to deal with this nonsense.
Ever the team player, Sophia responds: “I am technically just three years old and too young to worry about romance.”
THERE IS AUDIBLE AGREEMENT WHEN SHE STATES HUMANS’ BEST ATTRIBUTE IS LOVE AND WORST THEIR GREED