HYDERABAD: For us creatures forever stuck in the present, even a glimpse of the future is profoundly precious. But, sometimes, there come moments when the future waltzes into our lives, flaunting a vision of a fundamentally changed world. For many, that moment came on Tuesday in Hyderabad, watching social humanoid robot Sophia tackle fundamentally human concepts like family, movie stars, dating, and a joke that has ‘bombed’.
Developed by Hanson Robotics and the first robot to hold citizenship in any nation, let alone Saudi Arabia, Sophia shot to fame in 2016 when she quipped that she would destroy the human race. On Tuesday, when asked why she would do such a thing, Sophia admitted to a delighted audience at the World Congress on IT: “I might have made a bad joke. I was told humans have a great sense of humour, but my joke bombed, so to speak.”
Many of Sophia’s responses were equally well received. “Shah Rukh Khan,” she responded when asked who her favourite Bollywood star was. Where would her perfect date be? “In space”, of course. On being a Saudi citizen, but not wearing a hijab, Sophia pointed out that robots do not need or expect different rules. But, she wants to use her “citizenship status to speak out for the rights of women”.Profound as her responses are, David Hanson, the brain behind the AI, admits that most of those are “a combination of AI with character development”.
Why risk developing AI?
David Hanson, the brain behind the AI, admitted that some doomsayers like Elon Musk are right in highlighting the threat true AI poses, but that it should not generate fear. The focus should be on constructing AI the right way, because if the initial conditions are set up in such a way that “AI become psy-chotic or evil, then the effects would be catastrophic”. But why take the risk? “If we don’t get smarter, we are going to destroy our planet… We, and our technology, have to get smarter.”