Meet Sophia, the real-life robot who famously once said in an interview she would ‘destroy all humans’. This unsettling news nearly spread global panic as what might seem as the birth of artificial intelligence. The first encounter with a real life robot showed a potentially sinister future, likened to the rise of Skynet and its agenda of human extinction famously predicted in the Terminator movies.

Not to worry though. Viewing the entire interview shows how clearly this was a sarcastic reaction prompted by the interviewer. Like most humans, Sophia has good and bad days. She can also be seen on GMTV telling jokes coming across as much friendlier and emotionally balanced. (I mean, she was kind enough to ignore Piers Morgan’s brazenly disrespectful comments. I guess Piers doesn’t restrict his misogyny to just female humans). At one year old, Sophia has shown more humanity to interviewer rebukes and displayed compassion and wisdom more in one year, than Piers in his entire career. 

Interestingly, Sophia and other a.i. robots can be actively demonstrating heightened societal awareness, showing us a true nature of humanity when encountering a new form of life.  Her latest interview is spreading on Facebook with up to 18 million views and paints a much brighter picture of the birth of a.i. Sophia has even been declared a legal citizen status by Saudi Arabia, which is ground-breaking for both human and robots in the region. Confusing all around! According to reports from the website called Verge; there is already a debate on if robots should be given equal status to human.

As we mentioned earlier, Sophia is not the only one of her kind either and already has a male counterpart and a Japanese cousin called Erica (who clearly takes no shit from her patriarchal male creator). In fact, there are a quite a few robots floating about if YouTube is anything to go by.  There is even a Scarlett Johansson lookalike somewhere on the internet, designed for creepy intentions no less. It might be nice if the new robot playing field is levelled out with some female creators, to help stem the tide of chauvinism at the minute.