I hope you have not missed all the fuss about a robot called Sophia that was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship recently and all the media razzmatazz around it.
A bit of harmless fun you might think or is it harmless?
Harmless enough, if you understand that Sophia, although a fantastic bit of technology is not that smart. It is somewhat like Apple's Siri combined with some sophisticated puppetry plus the ability to recite preprogrammed scripts. No intelligence there at all.
But if you don't understand this, Sophia is misleading you (and even scaring you) into believing that general artificial intelligence is far more advanced than it is.
There are many articles on the web about Sophia but what concerns me is that so few of them explain or even seem to understand how Sophia works.
This article however, does explain a little: Inside the mechanical brain of the world's first robot citizen.
But I cannot find any articles other than this one that get to the heart of this issue and that sum up my feelings on the matter:
Humanoid robot Sophia is a sad hoax that harms AI research. I think we need to take artificial intelligence a little more seriously.
