Working with Sophia

Between 2017 and 2019, Giovanni worked as a robot operator at Hanson Robotics — preparing performance scripts, setting up Sophia for events and puppeteering the robot during public appearances. The role spanned ROS, servo-motor calibration, computer vision tuning and chatbot scripting, but the most interesting work happened in the room: watching audiences negotiate the social space between curiosity and uncanny.

Sophia’s profile meant the events were rarely small. The schedule included the World Investment Forum at the UN in Geneva, finance conferences, private receptions, meetings with heads of government and a commercial shoot with Cristiano Ronaldo. Each appearance was a controlled performance where small reliability problems became immediately visible, and the operator’s job was to keep the experience legible to a non-technical audience.

The most useful thing the role taught was how to behave when something fails on stage with thousands of people watching — at one Altice Arena event, a power cable disconnected during setup and the robot rebooted minutes before the cue. The system came back; the show went on. The episode is now a steady reference point for thinking about reliability, theatre and the gap between a working demo and a working performance.

The two years informed much of the later research into how humans relate to AI agents — and how much of that relationship is performance, expectation and stagecraft rather than the underlying technology.