Many people worry that AI will take over the world. But just how far along is it, and is everyone in danger of a technological overthrow like many science fiction movies claim?

AI is an acronym, meaning “artificial intelligence,” basically a fancy word for robot. AI’s are used for many things today, even in the most seemingly simplistic things like Google. AI is more than just a robot, it’s mostly all technology. It uses the intelligence that was coded into it to respond to user interactions. 

Now that we understand more about what it is, how far along is its advancement? The most sophisticated and recent news of AI technology would be that of Sophia the robot. Sophia was created on February 14, 2016 by Hanson Robotics. From there she’s been in many interviews with many different news channels and events. In October 2017, she was given Saudi Arabian citizenship, the first non-human entity to be granted personship anywhere in the world. What’s more is that in November of the same year, she became the first non-human entity to also be granted a United Nations title, being named the United Nations Development Programme’s first innovation champion.

Many people enjoy Sophia, as she, in a way, stands to represent how far AI technology has come. Though, many people also dislike her, because of her knowledge, or the uncanny valley, which is when something that looks familiar or human isn’t quite right, mainly robots. However, according to David Hanson’s “Upending the Uncanny Valley,” he wished to use this to their advantage, stating “If our engineered realistic robots do satisfy a human’s discriminative taste for verisimilitude, then we have developed a powerful tool chest of principles for engineered non-realistic robots as well.”

In other words, they’re planning to use the uncanny valley as a way to design their robots to fit humankind’s standards of realistic and nonrealistic, and also as a tool for designing non-human-like machines as well.