What are your thoughts on the A.I. (Sophia Robot) that just became a Citizen in Saudi Arabia?

Sophia Robot just became a Saudi Arabia Citizen. She once said something about destroying humans, but then changed her mind. Are these A.I's capable of lying? Can we trust A.I?

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

Faust76 · 46-50, M

"Sophia is essentially a cleverly built puppet designed to exploit our cultural expectations of what a robot looks and sounds like. It can hold a stilted conversation, yes, but its one-liners seem to be prewritten responses to key words. (As Piers Morgan commented during an interview with Sophia, “Obviously these are programmed answers.”) And while Sophia does look sort-of-human, so do animatronic creations in theme parks." ... "His creations are certainly impressive feats of engineering, but fundamentally, Hanson is in the theater business, and he exploits misconceptions about AI and robots (particularly how advanced they are) in order to sell the illusion."

Which is probably more than needs to be said on that.

PoisonLace · 41-45, F

@Faust76 Then you agree that she shouldn't have gotten citizenship.

Faust76 · 46-50, M

@PoisonLace Well, you asked about "the AI", not about the citizenship. If you had asked about the citizenship, I'd said that I agree with the experts and human-right advocates who are saying it's opening a can of whoopass despite being obviously inane publicity stunt.

Or maybe it was a can of worms, you can never tell these days.

PoisonLace · 41-45, F

@Faust76 The citizenship was in the question. What are your thoughts on the A.I. (Sophia Robot) that just became a Citizen in Saudi Arabia? Maybe I should have typed it differently?

PoisonLace · 41-45, F

@Faust76 I found the article you took your original response from. Bravo...but not sure if it's a legit source. All other sources point to her having citizenship.

Faust76 · 46-50, M

The headline is perhaps unfortunate, you'll note the article itself talks about the robot having been granted citizenship. I think the point is that they disagree that it is an independent person that could be a "citizen", which I do too, I'd just word it differently. It was my understanding that the robot in question is just an animatronic puppet with essentially pre-recorded responses to a few key words, and so I went looking for a reference/proof to that.

The immediate concern would be that this technically allows oil sheiks to buy as many "androids" as they can afford to vote for them. So you see the citizenship or extra vote is really granted to the owner, not to an independent entity. A bad editorial decision on headlining the story, maybe, not "fake news".