It’s Hanson, too, who often exaggerates Sophia’s capacity for consciousness, telling Jimmy Kimmel earlier this year that the robot was “ basically alive,” for example. Much of this impact can be credited to the work of Hanson Robotics founder David Hanson, who, for many years, was a Walt Disney Imagineer, building sculptures for the company’s theme parks. The end-result is undeniably engaging, and despite Sophia’s often stilted and awkward conversation, viewers seem to be left with a sense of something more. “And it is absolutely cutting-edge in terms of dynamic integration of perception, action, and dialogue.” “None of this is what I would call AGI, but nor is it simple to get working,” says Goertzel. It’s not groundbreaking in the way that work coming out of companies like DeepMind or university labs, but it’s not a toy. And although most of Sophia’s dialogue comes from a simple decision tree (the same tech used by chatbots when you say X, it replies Y), what it says is integrated with these other inputs in a unique fashion. There’s face tracking, emotion recognition, and robotic movements generated by deep neural networks. As Goertzel, who is currently building a “ decentralized market for AI,” points out, it makes uses of a wide number of AI methods. It’s fair to say that Sophia isn’t unintelligent, either. “What does a startup get out of having massive international publicity?” he says. But if I show them a beautiful smiling robot face, then they get the feeling that AGI may indeed be nearby and viable.” He says there’s a more obvious benefit too: in a world where AI talent and interest is sucked towards big tech companies in Silicon Valley, Sophia can operate as a counter-weight something that grabs attention, and with that, funding. "If I tell people I'm using probabilistic logic to do reasoning on how best to prune the backward chaining inference trees that arise in our logic engine, they have no idea what I'm talking about. He admits that Sophia’s presentation annoys experts, but defends the bot by saying it conveys something unique to audiences. From that standpoint, thinking we’re already there is a smaller error than thinking we’ll never get there,” says Goertzel. “I’m a huge AGI optimist, and I believe we will get there in five to ten years from now. And in his opinion it’s better to overestimate, rather than underestimate, our chances of creating machines cleverer than humans. “For most of my career as a researcher people believed that it was hopeless, that you’ll never achieve human-level AI.” Now, he says, half the public thinks we’re already there. “If I show them a beautiful smiling robot face, then they get the feeling that AGI may indeed be nearby.” In interviews with The Verge, Goertzel said it was “not ideal” that some thought of Sophia as having artificial general intelligence or AGI (the industry term for human-equivalent intelligence) but, he acknowledged that the misconception did have its upsides.
SOPHIA THE ROBOT SOFTWARE
Experts in the field sometimes decry Sophia as emblematic of AI hype, and say that although the bot is presented as being a few software updates away from human-level consciousness, it’s more about illusion than intelligence.įor Ben Goertzel, chief scientist at Hanson Robotics, the company that made Sophia, the situation is conflicting, to say the least.
(AI ethicist Joanna Bryson told The Verge the stunt was “ obviously bullshit.”) Some were annoyed about the perception of Sophia itself - a robot that’s also a media star, with magazine cover-shoots, talk show appearances, and even a speech to the UN.
Others said it set a bad precedent for how we might treat robots in future. Some noted the grim irony of a robot receiving ‘rights’ in a country where women were only recently allowed to drive.
Sophia the robot was made a citizen of Saudi Arabia last month, but a lot of people weren’t happy about it.