Forward Sophia Smith is one of soccer's rising stars. In 2022, she led the Portland Thorns to the NWSL championship and won the league's MVP award. Learn more about her life and career.

"Forward Sophia Smith is one of soccer's rising stars. In 2022, she led the Portland Thorns to the NWSL championship and won the league's MVP award. Learn more about her life and career"--

This book considers David Hanson’s robots as a performative expression of our cultural moment, serving as a paradigm for the evolution of humanoid social robots. Mechanical beings have occupied the human imagination since antiquity. Now, they inhabit the pop-cultural imagination, embodying the apotheosis of humanity’s technological aspirations and dread. Sophia, Hanson’s most advanced robot, anticipates the future as she articulates the mythic pattern, narrative, anxieties, and hopes as old as humanity. Gendered as an attractive female with a face inspired by Queen Nefertiti and Audrey Hepburn, Sophia is a cipher, avatar, and turning point that brings humanity and technology a step closer to the emergence of a post-human species. The author is a transdisciplinary artist/scholar/educator working internationally in experimental performance, indigenous performance (ritual, shamanism), and social robotics. Hanson’s robots and Sophia are examined as performance media and events, as characters evolving as post-human narratives of technological beings. The emergent, complex, and collaborative relationships social robots have with technology, AI, performance, anthropology, mythology, psychology, sociology, popular culture, social media, politics, and economics are considered.

Take a trip around the world with Sophia Smith, as she regales readers with humorous tales of her journeys - with all the laughter, copious fun, brushes with death, and wonderment included. Meet Sting, Gianni Agnelli, Betty, Red, Alice, The Scotsman, The Wandering Teeth, and a villain at the Hotel Costes in Paris, among other characters. Hang on for the ride!