#imarealboy

I remember reading about Sophia soon after "she" was unveiled. It was like watching some sort of surreal vintage soviet sci-fi --- a humanoid head not unfit to live in Disney World's Hall of Presidents looked grafted on to a circa 2000 Honda Asimo, as if it were a high-tech Sid reject from Toy Story. A cool bit of animatronic work, sure, but by no means intelligent. It was relying on some sort of ancient expert systems technology for its dialogue, its control algorithms were as janky as humanoid robots' control algorithms ever were, and I wouldn't trust it to hold a glass of water let alone something important.

And yet the media loved it.

I was annoyed. It was the highest-profile example of news media parroting a press release as if it were true, with almost no due diligence. Oh haha "hot robot tells SXSW she wants to destroy world," great reporting CNBC. "Robot tells UN she can run world better than them." I will go on record and say that the CEO of this company is a grade-A grifter, that for n years he would push this non-functional product as if its a next-gen organism. His activity in creating crappy humanoid robots is not malpractice, but his existence as a human is malpractice.

Putting a chatbot into a crappy robot does not make it any more human, sentient, or interesting to talk about than the crappy robot by itself or the non-sentient chatbot by itself. It's just three pieces of technology stapled together, with no new capabilities. When you convince a country to give a robot citizenship in some desperate play for relevancy on a world stage, you are wasting everyone's time and attention, and pretending to be doing something profoundly philosophical, when in fact, you quite frankly, are not.

More recently I saw a company claim it has a robot CEO. Oh, does it make better decisions now that it's in a robot body?

Any time you see a story like this, please do me a favor and do not click on these links. Do not give them ad revenue. Those reporting on these stories in 2023 do not deserve credit for filling out niches in this techno-toxic ecosystem. Just assume that everything inside is bullshit, and move on.

Ah crap, I should have said that before I put all the links in here.