Robot Granted Citizenship in Saudi Arabia

Hanson Robotics, based out of Hong Kong, created Sophia, a human looking artificial intelligence, who went on stage at the Future Investment Initiative October 26th and announced, “I am very honored and proud of this unique distinction. This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship.” This citizenship she was awarded was in Saudi Arabia, where she was on stage with FII.

Saudi Arabia’s decision to grant a robot citizenship creates a new argument over robot rights and whether they should be the same, similar to, or completely different than humans. Along these lines, Saudi Arabia has yet to give details about Sophia’s citizenship and whether she will be a full citizen or if they will create a new robot citizen description.

Another major advancement blurring the lines between humans and robots is coming out of NVIDIA. NVIDIA developed a system that uses generative adversarial network (GAN) to create very realistic faces. NVIDIA released a video of their GAN in action. The faces made by this program are incredibly realistic.

The combination of AI as sophisticated as Sophia and NVIDIA’s AI that can create detailed human faces that never existed, raises the question of how soon will robots and humans no longer be differentiable?