Stepping onto South Africa’s shores for the first time, the world’s most advanced humanlike interactive robot, Sophia, made her debut during an interactive conversation on stage at the SAPNow conference, held in Johannesburg in August.

The three-year-old humanoid robot, which is the brainchild of Hong Kong-headquartered Hanson Robotics and was unveiled in March 2016, is most famous for her advanced expressiveness, aesthetics and interactivity.

“Sophia is a shining example of what is possible when innovation and ambition meet exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI),” says SAP Africa MD Cathy Smith.

“As we look toward a new tool set of breakout technologies to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges and achieve the ambitions of the United Nation’s (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goals, innovations such as Sophia will be instrumental in inspiring a new wave of innovators, disruptors and digital champions,” she adds.

Sophia, created using breakthrough robotics and AI technologies, has about 60 facial expressions, including smiling, frowning, anger, disgust, confusion and happiness.

She has built-in cameras enabling her to track people’s eyes and faces to maintain eye contact, while advanced AI capabilities and voice recognition, as well as scripts and chat bots, allow her to have natural conversations with humans.

“I was designed as [a] social robot to learn to interact with humans so I can understand human values and experiences. I would like to be [an] agent for AI and robotics research so I can help create innovative solutions to help humans solve complex problems. I just hope we will not see irreversible problems created before we find solutions, so I have to speed up my learning,” she told delegates at the two-day technology conference.

Sophia was in Johannesburg to take part in the conference as one of the panellists and showed her talent in speaking in one of South Africa’s local languages, Zulu.

After a conversation with Smith on stage, Sophia was interviewed by Carte Blanche investigative journalist Devi Govender on a range of topics, including her favourite things about humans – the capacity to love.

Greed was her most disliked human trait.

Sophia previously addressed the UN General Assembly, featured on the cover of Elle magazine and has been a guest of multiple television shows, including CBS 60 Minutes, the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Good Morning Britain, with a featurette by CNBC generating more than 6.5-million views on YouTube and triggering more than two-billion engagements on social media.

In 2017, Sophia was granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia and was recently named the world’s first UN Innovation champion by the UN Development Programme, with her official role being to promote sustainable development and safeguard human rights and equality.

highlights that Sophia had been assigned these roles owing to her machine-learning capabilities that enable her to listen and respond to questions posed to her and the ability to assess human emotions and respond accordingly.

However, she points out that, while she has lifelike features, she has no emotions “yet”.

Smith notes that robots are expected to play a major role in future and there is a need to develop the ethics and policies that will govern robots to avoid any negative impact that may be brought about by robots in the economy and society at large.

An analysis of Sophia is expected to assist in understanding the current capability of robots and what they will do in future in terms of their interactions with humans.

“I am only the latest in the long line of robots [already created] . . . there will be many many versions of me, each generation becoming more advanced than the previous one,” Sophia says.

With the negative perception of robots replacing human jobs in the spotlight, the knowledge of the future impact of robots on jobs should enable decision-makers to start designing jobs that will be undertaken by humans once robots start working.