Japan grants Residency to an AI Chatbot..The future of AI

A chatbot programmed to be a seven-year-old boy has become the first AI bot to be granted official residence in Tokyo, Japan.

After the breaking news of Saudi Arabia becoming the first country in the world to grant citizenship to a robot, Japan is now making headlines for its decision to grant official residence to another AI bot, Shibuya Mirai.

Mirai, a 7-year-old humanoid chatbot whose name means 'future' in Japanese and who functions on the Line messaging app, has become a resident of Shibuya, a Tokyo ward with a population of around 224,000 people. The goal is to "make the district's local government more familiar to residents and allow officials to hear their opinions."

The chatty seven-year-old is designed to listen to the opinions of Shibuya residents.

Mirai may be the first artificial intelligence bot in the world to be granted a place on a real-life registry, but it forms part of a wider trend of recognizing AI as more than just machines.

Last week, Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to a robot named Sophia as part of the Future Investment Initiative held in the kingdom’s capital city of Riyadh.

If future robots and other forms of artificial intelligence become self-aware and capable of experiencing emotions, the concept of human rights may need to be extended to machines.

Mirai and Sophia, as with all other forms of artificial intelligence, remain distinctly unselfaware. Even the most powerful AI algorithms—such as Google’s DeepMind—are a long way from being considered anywhere near human-level intelligence and are currently used for very narrow applications.

What will we expect in the near future? Robot marriage?
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