World's first robot citizen an atheist?

[emjay]

According to Quartz, experts who have reviewed the robot's open-source code state that Sophia is best categorized as a chatbot with a face.[19] Many experts in the AI field disapprove of Sophia's overstated presentation. Ben Goertzel, the chief scientist for the company that made Sophia, acknowledges that it is "not ideal" that some think of Sophia as having human-equivalent intelligence, but argues Sophia's presentation conveys something unique to audiences: "If I show them a beautiful smiling robot face, then they get the feeling that 'AGI' (artificial general intelligence) may indeed be nearby and viable... None of this is what I would call AGI, but nor is it simple to get working." Goertzel added that Sophia does utilize AI methods including face tracking, emotion recognition, and robotic movements generated by deep neural networks. Sophia’s dialogue is generated via a decision tree, but is integrated with these outputs uniquely.[40]

According to The Verge, Hanson often exaggerates and "grossly misleads" about Sophia's capacity for consciousness, for example by telling Jimmy Kimmel in 2017 that Sophia was "basically alive".[40]

In January 2018, Facebook's director of artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun, tweeted that Sophia was "complete bullshit" and slammed the media for giving coverage to "Potemkin AI". In response, Goertzel stated that he had never pretended Sophia was close to human-level intelligence.[41]

Wikipedia || Sophia (robot)

Yeah, it's amazing what a pretty face, albeit in this case a juddery one, can do in making you (well, me at least) perceive it and talk about it, not for real but as a dispense of disbelief, as a she rather than an it.

But then it's not hard to perceive agency in much less than that; I learnt about an interesting party game... find the murderer or something like that... where a bunch of people are ostensibly tasked with answering the questions about a murder (or whatever the subject is) to a single participant, who then has to guess who the murderer is. But what the question answerers are in fact doing, is answering the questions based on the number of characters in the question... something like 'yes' for an odd number, 'no' for an even number. So at the end of the game, when the player reveals his answer it is based entirely on his brain's gap filling of a story around these supposedly meaningful, but in fact essentially random, clues. I thought that was very interesting so I recreated the game as a computer program, that just answers yes or no depending on the number of characters in the question, and the effects on perception are pretty cool; it's very easy and intuitive to gap-fill a story and/or character around the the answers, even if the only consistency is the fact that it will answer exactly the same question the same way every time (but not if you make a typo ).. and bias will do the rest, even if some of its answers are contradictory. So that's what can happen without AI, so add more consistency of answers through the addition of AI, and it's not surprising that it could be perceived as having agency.