This book considers David Hanson’s robots as a performative expression of our cultural moment serving as a paradigm for the evolution of humanoid social robots.
Mechanical beings have occupied the human imagination since antiquity. Now they inhabit the pop-cultural imaginal, embodying the apotheosis of humanity’s technological aspirations and dread. Sophia, Hanson’s most advanced robot, anticipates the future as she articulates the mythic pattern, narrative, anxieties, and hopes as old as humanity. Gendered as an attractive female with a face inspired by Queen Nefertiti and Audrey Hepburn, Sophia is a cipher, avatar, and turning point that brings humanity and technology a step closer to the emergence of a post human species. The author is a transdisciplinary artist/scholar/educator working internationally in experimental performance, indigenous performance (ritual, shamanism), and social robotics. Hanson’s robots and Sophia are examined as performance media and events, as characters evolving as post-human narrative of technological beings. The emergent, complex, and collaborative relationships social robots have with technology, artificial intelligence, performance, anthropology, mythology, psychology, sociology, popular culture, social media, politics, and economics are considered.