Originally published 2021-01-29.
In January 2021, Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, the company behind the humanoid robot Sophia, announced that it planned to mass-produce its robots and sell "thousands" of them that year. Four models, Sophia among them, were due to start leaving factories in the first half of 2021, and a new robot called Grace was being designed for healthcare. The company's pitch was that the Covid-19 pandemic had created real demand for machines that could help in hospitals and keep isolated people company.
The announcement was a statement of plans. Here is what was promised, what the market looked like, and why experts were divided.
What Hanson Robotics announced
Reuters reported the plan on 25 January 2021. Founder and chief executive David Hanson did not give a specific sales figure, saying only that the company hoped to sell thousands of robots during the year, across four models including Sophia.
The robots were pitched at care homes, hospitals and other settings where staff were under pressure and contact between people had to be limited. Suggested uses included carrying supplies from room to room, helping with communication, and offering conversation to patients cut off from visitors. Hanson argued that a human-like face was the selling point: "Sophia and Hanson robots are unique by being so human-like," he told Reuters.
Grace, the healthcare robot the company said it would launch in 2021, was designed specifically for that kind of work.
Who is Sophia?
Sophia was activated on 14 February 2016 and made her public debut at the SXSW festival in Texas that March. Her face was modelled partly on Nefertiti, Audrey Hepburn and David Hanson's wife, Amanda. Cameras in her eyes let her track faces and make eye contact, and she can imitate facial expressions and hold simple conversations on prepared topics.
She quickly became a media star. In October 2017 Saudi Arabia granted her citizenship, the first time any country gave a robot that status. A month later the UN Development Programme named her its first Innovation Champion for Asia and the Pacific. In 2021 a self-portrait "painted" with her help sold for nearly $700,000.
Why the pandemic seemed like a turning point
The timing was not accidental. In 2020 and early 2021, hospitals around the world were short of staff, visitors were banned from many care homes, and every human contact carried an infection risk. Robots were already being tried for some of these jobs: SoftBank's Pepper was used to spot people not wearing masks, and robots from CloudMinds helped run a field hospital in Wuhan.
Johan Hoorn, a professor of social robotics at Hong Kong Polytechnic University who has worked with Sophia, thought the crisis would speed things up. "I can infer the pandemic will actually help us get robots earlier in the market," he told Reuters.
What the market numbers actually showed
The broader robotics industry was growing fast. According to the International Federation of Robotics' World Robotics 2020 report, worldwide sales of professional service robots rose 32% between 2018 and 2019, to $11.2 billion. Some figures repeated online at the time put the total at $12.2 billion, but the IFR figure was $11.2 billion.
The details matter. Medical robots made up 47% of that value, and most of it came from robotic-assisted surgery systems, which reached a record $5.3 billion. Logistics robots, such as machines that move goods around warehouses, more than doubled in value to $1.9 billion. Humanoid social robots like Sophia were a very small slice of this market.
What robots can and cannot do in care
Robots are good at some hospital tasks: carrying medicines or linen along corridors, disinfecting rooms, or letting a doctor speak to a patient over a video link. These jobs are repetitive and predictable, and a robot does not tire.
Clinical care is different. A claim often repeated online is that studies show robots make fewer mistakes, such as misdiagnoses, than trained doctors. There is no such general finding. Some software tools perform well on narrow tasks, such as reading certain scans, but each use has to be tested on its own, and diagnosis remains the job of qualified clinicians. A humanoid robot answering questions in an interview is a designed demonstration, not proof that it can provide therapy.
Sophia herself made the case for social robots in that same interview, saying robots like her could help communicate, offer therapy and keep people engaged. Asked about fear of robots, she quoted the famous line "we have nothing to fear but fear itself", adapted from Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933 inaugural address, before quipping, "What did he know?"
The sceptics' view
Sophia has always had prominent critics. Quartz likened her to a chatbot given a face, Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun dismissed the hype around her in blunt terms, and The Verge described claims about her consciousness as grossly misleading. Ben Goertzel, a former chief scientist at Hanson Robotics, has said plainly that she is not artificial general intelligence.
Wider social concerns came up too. Some ethicists worry that giving lonely older people a talking machine could become an excuse for less human contact rather than a supplement to it. Others raise the long-running question of whether automation will take away jobs faster than it creates new ones.
Publicly available, independently verified figures on how many robots were actually sold under the 2021 plan are hard to find, so the announcement is best read as a record of the company's ambitions at a moment when the pandemic made robot helpers look more appealing than ever. Whether humanoid robots become a normal part of hospital life will depend on careful trials, real benefits for patients, and the people who work alongside them.
Sources: Reuters via Ahram Online: Makers of Sophia the robot plan mass rollout amid pandemic (25 January 2021); Wikipedia: Sophia (robot); The Robot Report: Service robot sales up 32% worldwide, says IFR (October 2020). Video: Reuters.
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