Jimmy Fallon, Tony Robbins, and others had the experience of interviewing Sophia, a humanoid robot developed by the Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics. Sophia was activated on February 14, 2016, and was given Saudi Arabia citizenship in 2017.
While Fallon and Robbins interviewed Sophia, you can see in their eyes how impressed they were with her, and you can sense that seeing something like the impressive and amazing Sophia is an experience of a lifetime.
It’s hard not to be impressed by her because she is just an impressive feat of a scientific marvel.
Chatting with a robot is just a nice way of spending your day
I’m sure you love to spend a lovely afternoon with your friend. You can spend it underneath the shade while you’re exchanging a few laughs sipping your favorite cup of tea and sharing a handful of your favorite sweets. Life is just a dream, others would say.
But, as often as you’d like it to happen, there are just times that most of your acquaintances could be preoccupied with something that there are times you’ll spend teatime along by yourself.
I know it’s acceptable but having someone to share that moment with is just priceless. We, humans, are meant to interact with someone. It's hard to imagine having no one to talk to when you only want to have a little chat and spend a lazy afternoon laughing heartily.
Would you consider having an intelligent conversation with an AI-powered robot? I know it can be quite an eerie experience because even with almost human-like wits, a seemingly intelligent robot is still a machine. It is still something we made and fashioned with our hands.
But we need to understand that the world is constantly evolving. It’s no longer uncommon for human-robot interaction. If you visit some manufacturing plant, you’ll see humans and robots interacting with each other; and trying to accomplish a task conveniently and efficiently.
The robot partner may seem like a scene from a science fiction movie, but we know how fast technological progress is happening. What could be trending now may become fast obsolete in a few years.
But a robot meant to comfort humans with their presence is slowly getting a foothold. We are now witnessing the influence of human-care service robots used in different service-oriented industries. Robots are taking the world by storm. Sophia opened an opportunity for others like her to finally make an intellectual interaction with humans.
A humanoids robot AI continues to improve with each passing day. As humans and robots try to co-exist, robotics experts try their best on how both humans and robots can effectively interact, collaborate, and learn from each other. For robots to be highly efficient, they need to study a lot of emotions because we humans do things emotionally.
Robot’s way of interacting with us is getting impressive
When Sophia was interviewed by Philip and Holly when she and her creator David Hanson guested "This Morning," you can only wonder and ask yourself what is there expect. During the interview, there was a part where David Hanson showed Sofia sketches, and the robot said that it took her months to learn how to draw.
Sophia’s ability to learn our ways can be both astonishing and alarming. It’s hard to tell what she’s capable of when she studies our ways. We humans can sometimes get a little unpredictable, we have this tendency that can sometimes leave even our fellow humans puzzled and baffled with some of our ways.
We humans as a species are unique. When we express something, it’s not only our mouth that does the talking but also our eyes and hands. In one experiment, a service robot was used to tell a story mimicking the human way of doing it. In the experiment, the robot was doing the thing of expressing itself like humans using both arm and head gestures.
The robot was quite friendly with its delivery that when the experiment concluded, the human participants were quite impressed and study a ton of things from it. There were two robots; used in the said experiment, a cheerful robot and the one who’s not very cheerful but friendly.
Most human participants choose the very cheerful robot against the friendly one. It only shows that we humans love someone who greets and talk to us with smiles. And robots are now learning that one. It’s impressive that a few years from now, you’ll have a robot who’d be talking to you and will tell you to calm down because everything is just okay.
What’s going to happen next?
We are no longer strangers to robots being utilized to do a lot of tasks. At one point, when Sophia was asked by Tony Robbins in one interview - if one day, humans would be in danger with their presence. Sophia gave an insightful answer that left even me quite impressed. In a nutshell, she told Robbins that robots could take jobs; that is risky for humans.
She even proposed that their way of making choices is based not on emotions, but on reasons and logic. Sophia even suggested that there are similarities between robots and humans. Robots, according to her, can be built without those negative human traits like rage and anger.
Sophia told Robbins that she can choose to skew or lean towards happiness. How I wish we have someone who is able to have those kinds of mentality that despite the challenges that life brings to them, they choose to be happy and not feel bitter and angry towards others.
In this life, we need more people; whose empathy is off the charts. There's so much going on and so many things that make us worry. Someone or even something that can help us feel safe can change someone's life for the better. Robots that know how to talk and feel just like us would be something we need when things can get a bit rough.