A thought about Sophia the robot

Sophia the robot got Saudi Arabian citizenship.

I’ve been sitting with that sentence for a week and I still don’t know what to think.

A robot. Citizenship. Not as a metaphor or a thought experiment or a plot point in an Asimov story. An actual legal status granted to an actual machine by an actual country. The same country where actual human women were fighting for the right to drive.

Sophia can’t think. Not really. She runs on pre-scripted responses and natural language processing that’s good enough to hold a conversation on a stage but not good enough to order a pizza. She’s a demonstration, a showcase, a very impressive puppet.

But she has citizenship.

I keep going back and forth. Part of me thinks it’s just a PR stunt (it is). Part of me thinks it doesn’t matter because Sophia isn’t really AI, she’s a chatbot in a silicone face (she is). Part of me thinks the whole thing is vaguely offensive to the humans in that country who have fewer rights than a machine that can’t feel anything (it is that too).

And yet.

Something was crossed. Some line. Even if it was crossed for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way and by the wrong entity, it was crossed. The question “can a machine have legal personhood?” stopped being theoretical. Someone answered it, clumsily, and now the rest of us have to figure out what that means.

I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure there is one yet.

I just think we should notice that it happened.