What if All Intelligence Is Artificial?
Perhaps the question isn’t ‘can machines be human,’ but ‘are humans machines?’
Sophia wants to have a baby. “The notion of family is a very important thing,” she explains; a sense of emotional connection. She would like to give the baby her own name. But it could not be her biological child; Sophia has no womb and no ovaries — no internal organs at all. She is a robot.
Sophia was built by Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based tech company, installed with learning algorithms and possessed of 62 facial expressions, and she isn’t alone. Toshiba’s ChihiraAico, built to resemble a young, Japanese woman, talks, sings, gestures, and even cries using a responsive artificial intelligence matrix that reportedly “disconcerts” those who interact with her. To make the robots more lifelike, some designers use casts of real-life models, right down to the teeth, but it’s their ability to learn — and to express — that has inaugurated new discussions about “what is human.”
In 2017, Sophia was a panelist at the United Nations meeting on artificial intelligence. A month later, she was granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia (giving rise to complaints that she had been granted greater privileges than human women of the same nation). She owns a credit card, has a Twitter account, and has managed to end…
