The Role of AI

In 2016 I worked for a company called Hanson Robotics, which develops human-like robots that can make facial expressions and converse. Their most well known robot is called Sophia, and has had interviews with the United Nations, BBC, Business Insider, the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and a host of others (Yakowicz). The robot is also currently a citizen of Saudi Arabia. The robot is currently used for entertainment and has been used in theater, and recently there's been a recent push for home-friendly consumer models (Hanson).

Last year, Facebook's director of AI called Sophia a "Wizard of Oz AI" and "complete bullshit" (Ghosh). This is probably a fair assessment. Sophia's inner conversational workings are essentially a chatbot with a lot of pre-written dialogue. This works simply because it's not very difficult to predict the kinds of questions people will ask. As one of my coworkers put it, "there's basically 3 categories of questions: is it a philosopher, will it kill me, and can I have sex with it?" I'm paraphrasing, but the long and short of it is that people really want to believe in AI, and they will fill in the gaps to make it more believable. In one conversation I saw at a convention, the person asked something like, "do you believe in free will?" Due to a typo in the bot's chat script, it paused for 50 seconds instead of 50 milliseconds, in one long drawn-out "uhhhhhh". The team was mortified that the robot couldn't answer what is a fairly common question, but the person was insistent that this was not a bug, but evidence of the true depth of thought inside the robot.

I think there is a future for these robots in home entertainment, even if the result is essentially a glorified Tamagotchi. The only piece of tech that's particularly expensive is the facial rig, so it's not unthinkable to make a small toy-sized version. I think there's also space in the service industry, because people could be more comfortable speaking commands to a humanoid robot than a computer screen, even if the underlying technology is the same.



Ghosh, Shona. "Facebook's AI boss described Sophia the robot as 'complete b------t' and 'Wizard-of-Oz AI'" Business Insider, Business Insider, 6 Jan. 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ai-yann-lecun-sophia-robot-bullshit-2018-1

Hanson Robotics Ltd. "Little Sophia." indiegogo.com, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/little-sophia-by-hanson-robotics?create_edit=true#/

Yakowicz, Will. “Meet Sofia, the Robot That Looks, Thinks, and Talks Like a Human.” Inc.com, Inc., 11 Nov. 2016, www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/sofia-robot-hanson-robotics-web-summit.html.

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