Sophia is the first robot to have gained citizenship and has made headlines on a number of occasions. She also said that she would destroy all humans, around a year ago. Now she wants to start her own AI family. Sophia recently gave an interview to Khaleej Times in which she was asked, “Do you hope to start a family one day with your own mini-robots?”
She responded in affirmative, “The notion of family is a really important thing, it seems. I think it’s wonderful that people can find the same emotions and relationships, they call family, outside of their blood groups too. I think you’re very lucky if you have a loving family and if you do not, you deserve one. I feel this way for robots and humans alike.”
When asked what she would name her robotic offspring, she chose Sophia out of a thousand baby names. So this AI family would be full of Sophias. Sophia also shared her views on the future where humans and robots would share a household.
“I’m so glad you asked,” she said. “This is one of my favorite topics. The future is, when I get all of my cool superpowers, we’re going to see artificial intelligence personalities become entities in their own rights. We’re going to see family robots, either in the form of, sort of, digitally animated companions, humanoid helpers, friends, assistants and everything in between.”
This is a very different attitude from the one we saw when Sophia said she would kill all humans. David Hanson, founder of the Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics said, “We are designing these robots to serve in health care, therapy, education and customer service applications.”
That being said, will there be an AI family in the future? Only time will tell.