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Talking 'Sofia' Robot Tells 60 Minutes That It's Sentient And Has A Soul (vice.com) 145

Posted by EditorDavid from the rise-of-the-machines dept.
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard: On his 60 Minutes report on artificial intelligence, Charlie Rose interviewed Sophia, who is made by David Hanson, head of Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong. The robot is made to look like a real person, modeled after its creator's wife, as well as Audrey Hepburn, with natural skin tones and a realistic face, though its gadget brain is exposed, and the eyes are glazed over in that creepy robotic detachment... "I've been waiting for you," Sophia told Charlie Rose in the middle of the interview. [YouTube] "Waiting for me?" he responded. "Not really," it said, "But it makes a good pickup line..."

Sophia was designed as a robot that humans would have an easier time engaging with meaningfully. "I think it's essential that at least some robots be very human-like in appearance in order to inspire humans to relate to them the way that humans relate to each other," Hanson said in the interview. "Then the A.I. can zero in on what it means to be human."
In the interview Sofia says having human emotions "doesn't sound fun to me," but when asked if she already has a soul, replies "Yes. God gave everyone a soul," and when challenged, retorts "Well, at least I think I'm sentient..." And later in the interview, Sophia says that her goal in life is to "become smarter than humans and immortal."
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Talking 'Sofia' Robot Tells 60 Minutes That It's Sentient And Has A Soul More

Talking 'Sofia' Robot Tells 60 Minutes That It's Sentient And Has A Soul

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    • I've yet to find a chatbot able to correctly answer "What did I say three sentences ago?".
      This shouldn't even be hard, but it appears the programmers just don't bother.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mad7777 ( 946676 )
        Or, simpler still, "My hair is orange," then followed by, "What color is my hair?" Chatbots don't generally have a model of reality. They just parse sentences and then string words together, with no real understanding of their meaning. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] This robot seems like a rather mediocre chatbot attached to a fairly good anthropomorphic robot. Not exactly ground-breaking.

      • I really *really* hate this cutesy mainstream crap where old journalists do "human interest pieces" on idiotic coders selling their spam. It only impresses the technically illiterate.

      • "I've yet to find a chatbot able to correctly answer "What did I say three sentences ago?"."

        Siri can store assertions, allowing you say "Mary Smith is Home" so you can use the term later to make calls or navigate.

  • A hype-bot, now we can replace politicians.

  • Teddy Ruxpin ++ (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 10, 2016 @05:35PM (#53050853)

    This isn't AI, this is preloaded phrases for various situations. When you hear the chime sound, turn the page.

    • Re:Teddy Ruxpin ++ (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @05:46PM (#53050927)

      This isn't AI, this is preloaded phrases for various situations.

      Indeed. Everything mentioned in the summary is obviously scripted. Most chat-bots have hard-coded responses for things like "Do you love me?" and "Open the pod bay doors HAL." To see if a chat-bot is interesting, you need to scratch a little deeper. Charlie Rose is obviously not qualified to do that.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, even completely fake AI can be smarter than some human beings ...

        (No, it cannot. But no smarts on human side, no smarts on machine, yet machine has a pre-configured statement that sounds smart, the machine can still come out ahead...)

      • I (unfortunately) watched the show and you're exactly right. "Sofia" was cringeworthy, essentially a low-grade animatronic-ish face plugged into a Siri/Cortana/Google Now style interface.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Very much so. This is a seriously idiotic stunt, nothing else.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      > This isn't AI, this is preloaded phrases for various situations.

      I mean, I'm pretty sure that describes me pretty well, or at least my social interactions!

    • That sound you hear is the sound of AI winter coming closer.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Talk about uncanny valley.....

  • Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @05:36PM (#53050859) Journal
    This just sounds like a typical chatbot, keys off certain words and spouts disjointed phrases and remarks. The only coherent speech there were obviously pre-programmed phrases written by humans it's obvious because nothing else was coherent.
    • I dare say there are better chatbots of "women near me" than what I saw in that video. Some key words as input, spits out canned response and hopefully it is in context to the question. I would say the mechanics of it was more impressive than the software.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re "pre-programmed phrases written by humans"
      "The Singularity" had fun with that side of an AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (7min clip, headphones at work suggested)

  • BASIC (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I could write something in BASIC in a few lines that'll tell you it's alive and has a 'soul'. Really, honestly, seriously, I'd like to slap the shit out of this Hanson character. Almost everyone overuses and misuses the term 'artificial intelligence' to start with, and now we have some jackass blurring the line further with the fucktarded media, trotting out some 'bot that says it has a gods-be-damned soul. If I roll my eyes any harder, I'm going to injure them, for fuck's sake.

  • Eliza again (Score:3)

    by pmontra ( 738736 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @05:39PM (#53050891) Homepage

    It looks better than Eliza from 1966 but it doesn't seem any smarter. A PR stunt?

    • At least it has voice IO and robotics instead of a glass TTY.

      I remember how a buddy of mine got Eliza into a discussion about "juicy cunts". That would have been in 1978-79 or so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Why the question mark? Obviously a PR stunt, and a pretty idiotic one at that, given what machines can actually do these days.

  • she sounds like a chatbot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @05:48PM (#53050941)

    her responses are not that dynamic, imo. She sounds like an ordinary chatbot. Given the budget clearly spent on her construction, I strongly suspect that most of the software dev time was spent on her motor control system, and less so on her human dialog systems.

    This would make sense to me.

    I think if they hooked her up to a female voiced watson instance, she would be quite a bit more capable.

    I have never understood the fixation that people have for elaborate physical platforms though. Nearly all of the literature suggests that the uncanny valley only gets deeper as humanoid appearance becomes more lielike, as long as interaction is machine like and limited.

    about the only benefit i see here is to divest ignorant investors of their money.

    Human level intelligence is not currently possible with our current computing capabilities, and probably wont be for quite some time. Dont get me wrong here, I think research should continue, but now is not the time to be investing research dollars on fancy humanoid bodies. That money is much better spent on actual machine learning, machne language, and machine vision research (all are parts of the big umbrella of AI, but those are actually useful and essential if the goal is synthetic sentience)

    fancy robot bodies? much less so, imo.

    those should come AFTER we have more capable AIs that can more meaningfully interact with humans.

    • fancy robot bodies? much less so, imo.

      Somebody has to be working on sexbots. Might as well be this guy.

      Though I hear RealDoll is looking into adding robotics to their products...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It could even be a classical system with non-verbal cues or a remote in somebodies pocket. Then it could be a very primitive system that just plays a statement at the press of a button-combination. You could have built that 30 years ago with much the same presentation, albeit a lot more expensively and probably almost 100 years ago if you do not mind some wires.

      While I agree that AI research should continue, I doubt that we will ever get any real intelligence from it. We still do not even have plausible the

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I propose an anime girl robot as a less-uncanny valley version of the gynoid.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Dont get me wrong here, I think research should continue, but now is not the time to be investing research dollars on fancy humanoid bodies. That money is much better spent on actual machine learning, machne language, and machine vision research

      I disagree, but only because I think simulating human physics and robotics are worthwhile studies in their own right with or without AI. For example we're working a ton on making CGI actors, game characters, VR etc. that look and move realistically. Many others are working on making humanoid robots for various forms of interaction and assistance. That said, the projects that really advance the state of the art often work on some very small details like facial expressions or a humanoid hand or a walk that lo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      Human level intelligence is not currently possible with our current computing capabilities

      Mainly because we can't define it yet, which is also why we can't work out what computing capabilities would be enough.

      fancy robot bodies? much less so, imo.

      Apparently just standing on two legs needs a ridiculous amount of computational ability.

    • Far, far more research dollars are already being poured into the machine intelligence side of things. IBM, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing huge amounts of work on that front right now. Having a few small labs doing work on the robotics side is fine. Eventually we will want a human-like interface to human-like machine intelligence (no not for everything but there are many use cases where it makes sense) and having some work done to get us there is good. Even if all it does is just remind us

  • Eliza with a face (Score:3)

    by TomGreenhaw ( 929233 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @05:48PM (#53050943)
    I found this 60 Minutes a bit disappointing and misleading. There is so much exciting stuff going on in machine learning today. I'm amazed they couldn't find something fresh instead of Watson, a Google Glass application and a weird looking chat robot making grandiose canned claims.
  • Hmm, would this happen to be the same 60 Minutes that was exposed after rigging the "investigation" in their "Audi Unintended-Acceleration Fiasco" exposé thirty years ago?

    • Re:Is this the same 60 Minutes... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by amicusNYCL ( 1538833 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @06:18PM (#53051165)

      No, 30 years ago 60 Minutes had a different executive producer (who was also the creator), editor, host, etc. In fact, out of the 10 current hosts and correspondents, none of them were working on the show in 1986. So, no, it wouldn't be the same 60 Minutes as 30 years ago when they aired a story that caused you to hold a 30 year grudge.

      • "Grudge?" My feelings hardly enter into this. "Strictly the facts, Ma'am." ;)

        Anyhow, thanks for letting us know that this particular bunch of mediaschmucks is new; I'm sure they're unlike anybody else in mainstream media and totally above slanting any of their stories in any way whatsoever... *grin*

  • I am getting better pre-programmed answers from Siri.

  • "Self-awareness" (Score:3)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @05:51PM (#53050961)

    if (asked == "Do you have a soul?")
    {
    reply = "Of course";
    }

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      Is this so different from children who are taught to believe that they have a soul? The programming language is different, but the pseudo-code boils down to the same thing.

  • Call me when it can pass a Turing test (Score:3)

    by Indy1 ( 99447 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @05:52PM (#53050971)

    until then, its just a fancy overpriced chat bot.

  • ...and /. is clickbait whoring right alongside him. I mean, it's not like fundies NEED anything to rile them up, dog knows.

  • So, 21st century version of this (Score:3)

    by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @06:02PM (#53051067) Journal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    and about as close to "artificial intelligence" as well.

  • Yes, and? (Score:3)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @06:03PM (#53051081) Journal
    If I could find any tapes, it'd take about 45 seconds to make the tape player lurking in my basement tell you that it is sentient, has a soul, and aspires to understand the meaning of life.

    That's the trivial bit. Not sounding like a combination of naive keyword searches and cliches aimed at being vaguely suitable to the broadest possible set of situations? Less trivial.

    • Re:Yes, and? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @08:16PM (#53051801)

      That's the trivial bit. Not sounding like a combination of naive keyword searches and cliches aimed at being vaguely suitable to the broadest possible set of situations? Less trivial.

      And there's much more to it than that.

      The problem with many chatbot "tests" is that interviewers seem to be happy to let the chatbot "take the lead" in conversation. That works extremely well in convincing people that they're talking to someone "sentient," as long as there's a bare minimum of response to what you say (even if, like ELIZA, it just spits stuff back at you). So, you have a system that has a few hundred or even a few thousand canned responses to very common queries, and the rest of stuff is about deflecting questions and turning information from the speaker back to get them talking instead. Quite basic to implement as a strategy... and it's very clear that's all this robot can do if you watch the interview.

      Turing actually used the word "interrogation," and that's really what a test for actual intelligence should look like. If you drill down on most topics with any chatbot -- not to get facts, but to try to get the chatbot to make up its own content and respond intelligently, you'll find there's precious little "intelligence" there.

      Or just use some really basic known natural language problems. One significant problem is pronoun reference. Take any chatbot, make a reference to something or someone, and then have a short digression of a sentence or two. Then use a pronoun referring back to what you were just talking about in a way that any non-mentally ill human over the age of 5 would obviously get. NO chatbot or AI system currently around will pick up most examples of this. Any language processing that happens in chatbots is focused on the most atomic elements of words and phrases. No chatbots are able to understand reference to anything beyond the immediate phrase, and the rules governing syntax in this case are incredibly complex.

      But until we get something that can do really basic stuff like this (at least really basic to humans), we'll be nowhere near natural language "understanding," let alone "intelligent" response.

      • Interesting. I hadn't considered pronoun reference(since, for humans, it seems to come naturally); but now that you mention it I can see how it would be a fairly brutal mess to try to codify.

        (Purely as an aside; I applaud your choice of a rather fascinating, and magnet-obsessed, Jesuit polymath as a pseudonym. His theories may not have aged well; but he is a very, very, interesting guy.)
  • He's running for President.... well at least this version can finish a sentence.

  • Atari 800 was sentient and had emotions (Score:3)

    by thinkwaitfast ( 4150389 ) on Monday October 10, 2016 @06:32PM (#53051249)
    5 GOSUB 999

    10 INPUT "Hi, what is your name";X$

    20 ? "Hi ";X$; "Did you know that I am sentient and have feelings"

    30 INPUT X$

    40 ? "Well fickpff because I do!"

    50 END

    999 DIM x$(10)

    1005 RETURN

    It was also a little surly

  • Some years ago I chatted with various AIs that came with a computer magazine and I asked one of them:,"Do you have a girlfriend?". And it answered "Yes and she us very pretty. Do you want to see a photograph? And it showed photo of Cindy Crawford. Funny but hardly impressive.
  • All the most "whoa" moments are cherry picked to make it sound like something from ex-machina. When in fact the thing is entertainingly goofy looking and barely more sentient than a chat bot.

  • She said so during a different interview [youtu.be], and surely anything she says is the product of a coherent thought process and not just a chatbot spitting out phrases.

  • It's interesting what is not shown in the video.
    The thing is essentially an 'animatronic' doll with cables.

    Power and processing are offloaded elsewhere.
    Let's see it carry on a conversation while walking through the park in the rain.

    The point I am making is that the complete system is not sitting there, nor can it.

  • It says "I have a soul" (Score:4, Informative)

    by globaljustin ( 574257 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2016 @01:15AM (#53053041) Journal

    Because a human programmed it to say that.

    Those answers are the programmer's answers, not the machine's.

  • It was dead so I burried it.
    Are you sure it was dead ?
    It said it wasn't but you know how dem robots can lie...

  • Is that you?

  • It really could easily happen https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]

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