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Meet Saudi Arabia’s Robot Citizen

The country granted citizenship to Hanson Robotics’ humanoid robot, Sophia. Yes, really.
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    This is Sophia. In 2017, Saudi Arabia granted her citizenship—making her the first synthetic humanoid to ever achieve such an organic accolade. So photographer Guilio di Sturco flew to Beijing to meet her at her home, Hanson Robotics, where she sat legless on a table in a corner.
  • 02
    At first glance you don’t know if she’s human or not,” di Sturco says. Her skin is made of “frubber,” and it covers an armature of microchips, sensors, tiny servomotors, Bowden cables and other gadgetry that allow her to smile, blink, and make over 60 facial expressions.
  • 03
    Which doesn’t mean she’s passed any kind of Turing test. Citizenship was mostly a Saudi stunt: Sophia can track and remember faces, communicate verbally and nonverbally, and even (awkwardly) joke around, but, as di Sturco says, “She’s still like a baby.”
  • 04
    Her “brain” is made of AI modules that live partly beneath her frubbery exterior and partly in the cloud. She’s getting smarter all the time, and Hanson Robotics plans to make her the chief AI of SingularityNET, a decentralized network for artificial intelligence running on the blockchain.
  • 05
    In chief scientist Ben Goertzel's thinking, developers will be able to upload their AIs to the network, and these AIs will be able to communicate and learn from each other continuously.
  • 06
    But what skills might a robo-citizen bring to her country today? Well, Sophia can lead people in mediation, as she is here with a student at the University of Hong Kong.
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    She’s also a reliable speaker at press events, like this one for SingularityNET.
  • 08
    But she isn’t a natural model. She sees through cameras in her eyes and on her chest, when Di Sturco tried to photograph her, she didn’t seem to understand what he was doing; her eyes gazed at anything but the lens.
  • 09
    Di Sturco stayed for two weeks. On last day, when he took her portrait, she had learned how to look directly at the camera and posed against a black backdrop lit by strobes, wearing a shirt from Zara he picked out just for her. “I wanted her to pass as a human,” Di Sturco says.

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Laura Mallonee is a writer for WIRED covering photography. ... Read more
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