Sophia is a social humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia was first turned on February 14, 2016, and made her first public appearance at South by Southwest Festival in mid-March 2016 in Austin, Texas, United States.
On the surface, Sophia is scarily similar to the AI-powered robots in film. It can crack jokes, make facial expressions, and seemingly understand what’s going on around it. Artificial intelligence as seen in the movies, like Her and the Terminator’s Skynet, is called “general AI” by those in the field. It can learn from one experience and apply that knowledge to new situations, as humans do. While some labs, such as Hanson Robotics and a slightly deceptive team at Facebook, are working on general AI, nobody has been able to create it yet.
When Sophia is talking to Fallon or the United Nations, it’s being handed the lines. It might determine when it’s the right time to say something, but those pithy one-liners aren’t from the robot.
The architect of Sophia’s brain, Hanson Robotics chief scientist and CTO Ben Goertzel, says that while Sophia is a sophisticated mesh of robotics and chatbot software, it doesn’t have the human-like intelligence to construct those witty responses.
Goertzel says Sophia is more of a user-interface than a human being—meaning it can be programmed to run different code for different situations. Typically, Sophia’s software can be broken down into three configurations:
A research platform for the team’s AI research. Sophia doesn’t have witty pre-written responses here, but can answer simple questions like “Who are you looking at?” or “Is the door open or shut?”
A speech-reciting robot. Goertzel says that Sophia can be pre-loaded with text that it’ll speak, and then use machine learning to match facial expressions and pauses to the text.
A robotic chatbot. Sophia also sometimes runs a dialogue system, where it can look at people, listen to what they say, and choose a pre-written response based on what the person said, and other factors gathered from the internet like cryptocurrency price.Our best AI today can do very specific tasks. AI can identify what’s in an image with astounding accuracy and speed. AI can transcribe our speech into words, or translate snippets of text from one language to another. It can analyze stock performance and try to predict outcomes. But these are all separate algorithms, each specifically configured by humans to excel at their single task. A speech transcription algorithm can’t define the words it’s turning from speech to text, and neither can a translation algorithm. There’s no understanding; it’s just matched patterns.
Sophia, while built to cleverly imitate the way humans interact, is not a sign of the robot apocalypse. But understanding how Sophia works is crucial when talking about something as important as giving robots rights before people—and what implications that might have when general AI or its semblance is closer than it is today.
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