RE: Hmmm.... Why now are simple natural language processing robots with some physical animatronics being granted citizenship?
I attended the Blockchain conference sessions at CES in January of this year. Dr. Hanson, of Hanson Robotics was featured as well as his Robot which looks just like the video clip you showed. Dr. Hanson explained all the good he expects that can be accomplished in the world as his company leads the natural language AI technology forward. I forget the robots name, but she was pretty freaky good at conversation. She blinked. She smiled. She was funny. The only think irritating was that she didn't have natural pauses in her speech.
After Dr. Hanson explained all the good he expects to come out of natural language AI, I had an epiphany. For every good doer there is at least one evil doer intent on doing bad acts. So although technology can theoretically be great for human beings, it can be just as devastating when the bad actors act.
Well a big part of detecting them is knowing what type of stuff trips them up. That's why I said even I made some years ago that fooled the average person, but they wouldn't have fooled anyone in a Turing Test... not even close.
It is important to realize that simulation is not the same as thinking they can get quite good a simulating. Thinking for themselves though is another story.