A Day at Hanson Robotics

Shoutout to David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics and genius engineer behind Sophia the robot for inviting me over to their headquarters!

Sophia is an ultra-lifelike robot featuring a patented rubber skin and a sophisticated servo system driving her uncannily human facial expressions. Oh, and she might also be mad that I commented on her appearance before her intelligence. Politely and firmly did she refute my (admittedly unwarranted) concerns about sentient humanoid AI robots during our conversation this afternoon.

As an AI developer, I could not miss the chance to learn from David and his team. David shared how he was inspired while pursuing a PhD in robotics after majoring in art to create the world’s first ultra-lifelike sentient humanoid robot. His decades-long journey in gathering talent in AI, robotics, and sculpting to make his dream come true is truly inspiring, and it paid off: Sophia may just pass for a human given her convincing expressions and fluent conversations. Though they met many hardships regarding funding, manufacturing, and development, their passion and teamwork drove them through.

We also had a wonderful discussion on AI sentience and the future of this field. In the eyes of a developer, passing the Turing test to be “effectively human” is an achievement of its own. Yet as an artist, breathing life into your creation still is held at the highest pedestal. Admittedly, modern chatbots such as GPT-4o, no matter how advanced, are still “mindless” in the sense that, in their core, they still effectively paraphrase their input training text. But with the explosive growth in this field in the past few years and passionate visionaries like David, who knows what the future brings?

Armed with a newfound drive to pursue my passions (and some coding life-hacks), I am reinvigorated to set on my own journey to breathe life into my own projects.