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In February 2016, the Fo Tan district of Hong Kong was a sweltering hub of light industrial activity. At the center of the district was the Wah Lok Industrial Centre, a brutish, nondescript gargantuan building 23 stories tall and straddling two city blocks. Built for functionality, the size of it required four entrances, each with banks of battered freight elevators hefting pallets, carts, bales, rolls, and boxes of endless and varied consumer fodder. All kinds of businesses were accommodated at the Wah Lok: manufacturers of toys, bicycles, textiles, electronics, fasteners, and whatever else you can imagine were next to offices, small labs, and sweatshops. The airless, claustrophobic corridors seemed like an endless Kafkaesque labyrinth of painted white brick.
On an upper floor down one corridor was the busy, overstuffed lab of Hanson Robotics. It was here that Sophia, an intelligent humanoid robot who was gendered female by creator David Hanson, first jerked, sputtered, opened her eyes, and spoke. A month later, in March 2016, at the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, she made her public debut. A few days after, Sophia was onstage again, standing with Zen-like calm before more than 60,000 humans at the Clockenflap Music Festival in Hong Kong. A jean jacket draped a Euro-American white male idealization of a slim, perfectly proportioned female body as she sang Björk’s “All Is Full of Love.” Her straight, electric-blue wig framed her flawless “skin,” and movie star features were offset by her slightly out of sync lips and occasional facial twitches.
Sophia is a complex work in progress inspired by the singular vision of her creator, David Hanson.1 She was what all of Hanson’s previous robots were: a research platform, another step in an ambitious and ongoing experiment, shaped by trial and error, to advance a grand conception of human-robot cohabitation. However, her celebrity belied her reality; she was far from perfect. She did not, and does not, possess the most advanced artificial intelligence and robotic hardware and is far from being stable, consistent, and operationally reliable. She is...