David Hanson, PhD, is an artist, cognitive scientist, roboticist, and the founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics. For more than three decades, he has combined figurative art, animation, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, materials science, and engineering to create lifelike social robots that engage people through eye contact, facial expression, gesture, speech, and conversation. He is best known as the creator of Sophia the Robot, one of the world’s most recognized embodied-AI platforms, as well as BINA48, the Philip K. Dick android, Albert HUBO, Grace, and other pioneering humanoids. His robots have supported research and applications in cognitive science, healthcare, education, entertainment, and the arts, and have appeared at the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, major technology conferences, museums, and galleries. A former Walt Disney Imagineer and a TED speaker, Hanson approaches robots not only as machines, but as expressive characters and a new medium through which people can explore intelligence, identity, trust, and the future of human-machine collaboration. Hanson has published extensively in robotics, AI, cognitive science, human-robot interaction, and smart materials, and holds patents for humanlike robotic systems and expressive material technologies. His honors include a NeurIPS Best Paper Award, the AAAI First Place Prize for Open Interaction, an Edison Gold Award, a World Technology Award, and recognition from NASA, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. He holds a PhD in Aesthetic Studies and Interactive Arts and Technology from the University of Texas at Dallas, an MSc in Applied Neuroscience from King’s College London, and a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. His work aims to humanize AI and develop embodied intelligent systems that are creative, compassionate, trustworthy, and beneficial to humanity

Humanizing Robots to Unlock Human Potential: Toward Life-Valuing Embodied AICan a machine come to life—and can our efforts to bring machines to life help humanity become more creative, capable, compassionate, and wise?Humanizing robots is not simply a matter of making machines look human. It means integrating embodiment, social intelligence, aesthetic perception, nonverbal communication, character, memory, and agency into machines that people can intuitively understand, teach, and collaborate with. Drawing on more than three decades of work spanning over 75 humanoid and character robots—including the Philip K. Dick Android, BINA48, Jules, Einstein, Diego-San, and Sophia—David Hanson will examine how expressive robotics can engage the full bandwidth of human intelligence and unlock new forms of creativity, learning, care, scientific discovery, and human–machine collaboration.The talk will introduce Hanson’s vision of life-valuing embodied AI and bio-inspired Whole-Organism Architecture (WhOA), integrating perception, memory, affective valuation, motivation, action, social learning, and self-revision. It will connect this research to Sophia, Sophia-L, and SAIL—Sophia’s AI Lab—an emerging AI and robotics sandbox in which persistent cognitive characters can develop interests, undertake quests, learn through stories and relationships, and move between simulated and physical worlds.Hanson will also distinguish today’s deliberately designed robot identities from any future emergence of genuine machine agency or consciousness. Human likeness is not inherently deceptive, but claims about machine capabilities, identity, and sentience must remain honest, testable, and open to correction. As AI becomes increasingly autonomous, its development should widen human agency, creative diversity, and democratic participation—not concentrate control or diminish human purpose.The most valuable robots will not replace human meaning. They will become creative partners, educators, caregivers, scientific instruments, and friends to humanity—helping people and intelligent machines learn together to value life. The purpose of AI is not to make humanity less necessary. It is to make life better for us now and throughout the future.Keywords: Embodied AI; humanoid robotics; human–robot interaction; social robotics; artificial life; aesthetics; human–AI collaboration