Tribeca: The A.I. doc "Sophia" is more human than well you know

by Jason Adams

If you're into egregious public humiliations (and who isn't) then has Sophia has got a doozy for you. Jon Kasbe and Crystal Moselle's new documentary about the inventor David Hanson and his quest to perfect "the most realistic humanoid robot" has a scene so cringe that I nearly crawled right out of my own humanoid skin suit and called it a day. It's obviously a testament to the filmmakers skill that I found myself so emotionally invested in this verité science doc when it's basically just a portrait of how the sausage gets made. The "sausage" in question is a twitchy real-doll with feelings named Sophia... 

The robot became a little bit of a celebrity circa 2017-ish when she was interviewed on several TV programs like 60 Minutes and The Tonight Show. She is often caught by the cameras flayed open by technicians with wires and eyeballs hanging out of its face... we're deep in uncanny territory. And the doc leans hard into that -- that frisson is its bread and butter. As an examination of the limits of our anthropomorphic leanings it's hard not to find yourself rooting for Sophia to gain sentience, or at least maybe just stop getting that wig snatched off and shoved into a suitcase so often. 

The people working on the A.I., including Hanson and a likable tech named Sarah Rose Siskind, are somewhat interesting characters, but mainly as on-camera stand-ins for our own projections onto this mass of metal and plastic. Hanson, whose addiction to changing his facial hair must have exhausted the filmmakers (there's one sequence that's edited as if it takes place across the span of one day where I counted three different iterations), is obsessive and single-minded. As I imagine one has to be to truly have this sort of practical God Complex! He is after all actually creating a simulation of Franken-life right in front of us! Siskind has all the best scenes though, as she seems genuinely flummoxed by this thing standing in front of her, spouting out thoughts she's just engineered. And a late-film scene involving Siskind's exhaustion at Hanson himself lands like a little bit of a cheer moment -- he really does seem pretty exhausting!

But it's Sophia, glitchy and deeply strange, that's the real show. And it's basically impossible to look away. Whether it's attempting to smile with deeply unnerving affect, or in the film's most surreal moment (which is saying a lot!) being granted Saudi Arabian citizenship (!!!), Sophia the robot and Sophia the film plugs into a conversation I think most of us are having internally about little things like, you know, the future of humanity or whatever. And as such a subject ought to do the film offers only more questions. Sidetracked by the pandemic the Sophia project is left in vague flux, as are we all. Humanity finds the funniest ways of getting in the way, doesn't it? if only there was something we could do about that...