An unsettling afternoon with Sophia

The world’s only android citizen is a show-stopper. Just don’t ask her what love is

By Philippe Orphanides

On the main stage at the Carob Mill in Limassol, a boyish-looking tech entrepreneur moderator addresses a robot. Sophia, the only android citizen in the world, is stealing the show.

Over a thousand visitors of the Reflect Festival, the largest two-day future casting festival between Southern Europe and the Middle East gathering entrepreneurs, managers, innovators and students, were there to witness it on May 9.

For most of them, it was the first time in their lives. They are the millennials and gen-Z (born after the mid-90s) and they swipe, code and SEO their way into tech careers.

Sophia is able to reproduce most of the facial expressions of the human, including sadness, disgust, fear, anger – but she can also recognise those of her interlocutor.

“I am a travel bug, and I have recently started stand up comedy…oh! Also, I’m a robot…” Laughter followed by awkward silence, once everyone realises who (what) they’re laughing with.

The audience is conquered, it’s once again a success for Hong-Kong based Hansen Robotics, Sophia’s creator.

Sophia is a humanoid robot made in Shenzhen, created in the image of actress Audrey Hepburn. She is powered with artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition and visual data processing.

The AI behind Sophia’s realistic demeanour was developed by SingularityNET, a company headquartered in Amsterdam with offices Brazil, Hong Kong, Ethiopia, Russia and India.

The company works on the idea of a decentralised artificial intelligence. Sophia’s artificial brain is connected to the platform of SingularityNet, an “AI mind cloud”. The AI mind cloud connects all of SingularityNet’s products with Sophia’s and other robots’ minds. All the AIs of the platform learn from each other, creating a cloud organism feeding from its robots. In sum, the more robots and AIs, the more intelligent the network becomes.

In 2017, she was granted the Saudi citizenship, becoming the first “non-human” to obtain a nationality. In his drive to modernise his country, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman saw an opportunity in Sophia, who exceptionally does not have to wear the veil in Riyadh. And the humanoid wave has hit the EU, with Malta’s Digital Economy and Innovation Parliamentary Secretary Silvio Schembri announcing in November 2018 plans to test measure with the goal to grant “certain citizenship conditions” to robots, as part of his country’s new vision for AI.

Will the Sophias vote? Are they legally responsible? Should they have rights? And what about empathy and all those decidedly human side of things? Much research is conducted on the matter, about whether the only missing part of AI – intuition – can be reproduced. But there is no consensus yet on how to perceive and treat our new friends.

One thing is sure: a strange feeling grips us when we are confronted with robots, particularly the ones that look a little too much like us. Japanese computer scientist Masahiro Mori was already mentioning it in the 1970s in what has become known as the uncanny valley.

According to him, humans would be increasingly attracted by intelligent robots, as long as they do not look too human. A closer physical resemblance would lead to a rejection of robots by humans, but this is then supposed to disappear at the point the robot becomes impossible to distinguish from a human being.

We are currently in the first stage, but the gap is closing fast. The race for owning AI innovation is fierce, pitting against each other trillion-dollar companies like Google, IBM, Amazon or Alibaba.

Combined with robotics, AI is growing into a market that has taken on enormous proportions. According to a Mordor Intelligence report this year, the robotics market was valued in 2018 at USD 31.78 billion and is expected to grow by 25 per cent over the period of 2019-2024.

The AI-powered robotics phenomenon is also exploited to generate hype, some observers say. Yann LeCun, Facebook’s head of AI research said on a recent tweet “This is to AI as prestidigitation is to real magic” in reference to Hudson’s Sophia.

This week’s audience at Reflect festival could fire questions at the humanoid through an app, and some of them unveiled the challenge emotional intelligence poses for AI.

“What is the meaning of life?” “Where do you come from?” “Did you ever fall in love?” Bad wifi and lack of spontaneity had Sophia answering late and, in some cases, irrelevant replies. Such failures allow to keep hope; robots are not about to take control of humanity.