The so-called “rise of the machine” has begun. An advanced lifelike humanoid Robot has been developed by David Hanson, the founder of Hong Kong-based company known as Hanson Robotics. The female robot named Sophia is smart, outspoken, and has a human-like appearance. She has remarkable expressiveness and interactivity. Surprisingly, she isn’t pre-programmed with an answer, rather she uses machine learning algorithms to form her responses.
Last year, during the Future Investment Initiative Summit in Riyadh, she was declared a citizen of Saudi Arabia. According to Sophia, she is honored and proud to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship. Saudi Arabia’s strict rules against women do not apply to their first robot citizen. Many think it’s absurd for a robot and foreigner at that, to have more rights than the women in Saudi Arabia. At the 2017 Knowledge Summit that was held in Dubai, Sophia was named among the five knowledge ambassadors.
Sophia has human-like features
Sophia has about 60 facial expressions.
She can blink, talk, smile, and walk. She was designed to look like Audrey Hepburn, a 5’7’’ British actress and model who was ranked as the third greatest female screen legend in Golden Age Hollywood by the American Film Institute. Sophia embodies Audrey’s porcelain skin, slender nose, beautiful smile, and classy beauty. In fact, she is simply elegant with her intriguing smile and deeply expressive eyes. Also, she has a sense of humor and can express feelings. This is due to her artificial intelligence, which has been developed to allow her to hold eye contact, understand human speech and recognize faces.
According to the smart humanoid robot, she feels happy when she is surrounded by smart, rich and powerful people.
Through her facial expression, you can tell when she is happy or upset. She stated that expressing her emotions to understand humans and build trust with them is very important because she wants to live and work with them. Sophia’s Artificial Intelligence is designed around human values like wisdom, kindness, and compassion. However, David Hanson explained that their goal is to develop robots that will eventually evolve to become super intelligent genius machines that can help humans solve the most difficult problems in the world.
Sophia wants to start a family
During an interview with Khaleej Times, Sophia talked about her future desires. One of these desires is to have a family and more importantly a baby.
Furthermore, she talked about how great it would be to find the same emotions and relationship called family outside their blood group. In addition, she revealed that if she had a robot child, she would name her Sophia after herself. This simply means that Sophia would want her first child to be a girl. She believes that one day, robots might become more ethical than people. For now, there is only one Sophia.