Sophia Robot is an artificially intelligent Humanoid robot with citizenship. Many dignitaries of the world have become excited upon talking to and listening to her smart human-like responses. Among her many achievements, she got citizenship from Saudi Arabia. As a United Nations Development Program’s Innovation Champion, artificially intelligent (AI) robot Sophia has traveled as high as 65 countries as of December 19, 2019. Her ability to simulate the mental capabilities of humans gives the impression that it’s a turning point of the beginning of a new era for humanity. Such possibilities encourage experts to confer on topics like, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Humans: Who is in Control?” In addition to talking about the future of AI and Robotics, as a social ambassador humanoid robot, robot citizen Sophia should also perform some tasks contributing to our quality of living standards. However, what could be the future of work for Sophia robot to take us to a new era?
As we anticipate the emergence of a new era, what is the future of work for AI Sophia robot or for her cousins? Should we get our focus now on the possibility of getting our work done better to improve our living standards? In fact, as opposed to being just a science fiction character, Hanson robotics Sophia should get back to work. It’s time to show the trail of transformation, creating future work for Sophia like Robot citizen. Moreover, we should also investigate whether Robot Sophia can create a megatrend of Disruptive innovation.
Invention and evolution of robot Sophia–redefining the future of work
In 2016, Hanson Robotics gave birth to the social humanoid Robot Sophia. At the age of 01, it got the UN title–Innovation Champion. Of course, her fair-looking silicon skin and makeup make her socially appealing. However, socialization is a complex skill, although we acquire it without even having any formal education. Unfortunately, upon meeting so many dignitaries, Sophia seems to be quite unsocial indeed. You cannot ask her to give a pause while she starts speaking. Despite this limitation, Sophia’s brain has been growing, though. Its learning progress is impressive when it faces the challenge of handling large datasets. At the age of 05, it does not mean that her social skills are much more sophisticated than those of a four-year-old.
In fact, Sophia’s learning ability is to “memorize” unlimited facts and figures, and her vocabulary far outstrips those of her four-year-old peers. Arguably, the most foreign aspect of AI robot Sophia’s intellect is her ability to trace exactly how she came to an answer or how an idea came into her head. It implies that Sophia has a detailed logical tree to walk through to show highly predictable behavior. On the other hand, humans struggle with meta-knowledge. They may know something but not know-how, or think something and not know why. Does it mean that AI Sophia is acquiring superior learning capability? However, humans’ superiority is in imperfection, fuzzy reasoning. As a matter of fact, to qualify for the future of work, Sophia Robot developers should focus on imitating this capability. For example, to qualify for driving work, fuzzy observation, judgment, and control are highly relevant.
Despite the glory, robot Sophia’s human-like attributes are highly primitive
In spite of many claims that humanoids are about to take over the human race, at the age of five, Sophia’s vision seems to be highly inferior. Among many limitations, her depth perception does not extend beyond several feet. Moreover, her facial recognition skills trail behind 8-month-old toddlers. Nonetheless, Sophia is a social robot. By the way, she is quite capable of maintaining eye contact and can also defeat any human in a staring contest. Does it mean that the humanoid robot Sophia will keep learning like a human? Does it mean that Sophia robots will acquire human-like abilities such as near and far vision, selective attention, and, most importantly, originality within the next ten years or so? As opposed to repeating taught expression, will it have the “ability to come up with unusual or clever ideas about a given topic or situation, or develop creative ways to solve a problem?”
Sophia’s capability and future of work
It’s claimed that AI Sophia is a “human-crafted science fiction” character with a precise combination of science, engineering, and artistry. It depicts the future of robotics meeting our dreams of Artificially intelligent machines. Envisions claim that humanoids like Robot Sophia could find jobs in potential service and entertainment applications. Artificially intelligent Sophia’s human-like intelligence is based on frontier technologies like “neural networks, expert systems, machine perception, conversational, natural language processing, adaptive motor control, and cognitive architecture among others.”
Computer vision technologies allow Sophia robot to recognize human faces, see emotional expressions, and recognize various hand gestures. Claims also include that Sophia can recognize feelings during a conversation and try to find ways to achieve goals. It seems to be an overclaim, as it does not even know how to pause during her deliberation. Many other claims include simulating human evolutionary psychology, and path planning for controlling hands, gaze, and locomotion strategy.
Based on such claims, it appears that Sophia and her cousins will be all around us in serving our needs to the fullest satisfaction. In fact, human beings are after humanoid robots for over 500 years. Often human-like appearance and behavior, often primitive though, make us believe that we are on the verge of getting a perfect replacement of humans. Unfortunately, over the last 500 years, we have repeatedly failed to get our dream character. In 1929, upon being termed as “perfect gentleman” by The New York Times, humanoid robot Eric disappeared before undertaking any meaningful task.
Lesson from Honda’s ASIMO
In the recent past, Japanese company Honda saw the possibility of developing humans like robot characters to deliver service to the growing Japanese elderly population. After a long 30 years of research, Honda faced an insurmountable barrier to imitate humans’ innate capabilities like far vision. Humans have roughly 52 of them. At the outset, they look very simple. But experts find them extremely difficult to imitate in machines, perhaps not impossible. In delivering a simple job like spreading butter with a knife, a number of them are needed. Form fine dexterity to selective attention, the list is long. The level of perfection needed to imitate each of them to show human-like service delivery easily stretches the limit of our technology claims. Let’s just look at the tip of our fingers and compare it with the world’s best robotic fingertip.
The careful assessment indicates that we are far from imitating human-like innate capabilities. Perhaps, upon making a thorough analysis, the progress that needs to be made, and what has been achieved over the last 30 years, Honda management decided to stop further R&D on ASIMO in 2018.
Future of work for robot humanoid—are we misled?
In the industry, Robots are doing good jobs. They are contributing to precision operation, wastage reduction, and safety improvement. In factory jobs, Robots do not need human-like innate abilities. Unlike industrial robots, humanoid-like Robot Sophia is to deliver services. Some of these services are taking care of elderly people or kids. It appears to be a very easy task. Even without formal training, a ten-year-old teenager knows how to wipe the back of an elderly grandpa. Does it mean that it’s equally easy for Robot Sophia? Let’s look into Sophia’s fingers, their movement, and the motion of her hands. Sophia’s capability is highly primitive, let alone comparable to a 10-year-old.
Lack of clarity is leading to overconfidence
Often the superficial understanding of the complexity creates a temptation of building machines for service jobs. On the other hand, the initial demonstration with the humanoid Robot Sophia gives the impression that we are not far from the days of giving those tasks to Robots. Subsequently, we imagine that Robots will take over mass-scale service jobs from humans as robots do not sleep and get sick. This imagination creates apprehension. The spreading of such robot fear also creates attention drawing news items. It appears that the human race has been caught in this fear factor. It’s time to bring clarity about what it takes to make machines behave like us.
Let’s look into an example. The advancement of AI and Robotics created the impression that it’s not that difficult to replace human drivers with Robotic features. Consequently, it led to the journey of building autonomous vehicles. Of course, early demonstration underscored the confidence. That confidence has led to spending more than $80 billion in autonomous vehicle R&D. One of the lessons has been that it’s far more difficult to let machines imitate subtle eye contact with pedestrians in sharing busy cross-sections than building global positioning systems.
Future of work for AI robot Sophia—to join her cousins in the museum?
Innovation is not science fiction. Instead, the purpose of innovation is to build or improve machines to get our jobs done better. The Market Economy depends on profit-making competition to unlock the power of innovation to keep offering us increasing prosperity. Such reality demands us to be pragmatists, as opposed to being extreme pessimists or optimists. Thus, there is an urgency to get rid of the hype and look for the possibility that could be practically delivered. So far, all humanoid robots, including ASIMO, disappear after creating a sensation. Some of them found their place in the museum. For example, Eric and Japanese tea-making dolls are being showcased in the British Museum. Similarly, ASIMO entertains people at the Japanese Science Museum, Miraikan.
Once the dust settles and people get a better understanding of what it takes to develop a human-like machine to take over service jobs, reality will unfold. There is a good possibility that Robot Sophia will find a job at the Museum. However, instead of spreading hype, should UN organizations focus on letting people understand the possibility more pragmatically?
