We need to get back down to business soon (or at least closer to it) but an important issue came up in yesterday’s post that many others have been familiar with for over 35 years. As knowledgeable and well-rounded online entrepreneurs, we should know about this too, especially since it has so much to do with the information technologies we use every day.

Sometimes cartoon characters, puppets, dolls, talking animals, robots, and the like are cute and amusing. But there is a thin line between them and a decidedly creepy android, haunted puppet or staring doll, zombie, corpse, animation, or artificial limb. That line is called (in English) the Uncanny Valley and it’s a central issue in many of the new technologies now emerging. 

The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis about robotics introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 and concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. According to Wikipedia:

It states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes strongly repulsive. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being’s, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels. This gap of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely-human” and “fully human” entity is called the Uncanny Valley.

Here is Dr. Mori’s original graph, followed by a simplified one that may make better sense:

While the principle is widely accepted by robotic researchers and laypersons alike, some heavily criticized the theory, arguing that Mori had no basis for the rightmost part of his chart, as human-like robots are only now technically possible (and still only partially). Still, the next stop clearly looks like the Uncanny Valley.

David Hanson, the roboticist referred to here yesterday, said the idea of the Uncanny Valley was “really pseudoscientific, but people treat it like it is science.” Sara Kiesler, a human-robot interaction researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, questioned Uncanny Valley’s scientific status, noting that “we have evidence that it’s true, and evidence that it’s not.”

Well, they can argue about the demonstrated scientific proof all they like—but tell that to someone at home alone with a haunted ventriloquist’s dummy staring at them and about to start making really creepy suggestions that may or may not be imagined! The experience of the uncanny is common to all of us—familiar enough that Freud even wrote a whole book about it almost 100 years ago.

You can read up about this more - some excellent sources are in the Wikipedia article as well as here, but this is the gist of it and you will certainly be running across this term again! 

In case you were wondering (as I did) what ”bunraku puppets” are, it seems this is one of the three major classical theaters of Japan, along with kabuki and noh drama - a sophisticated puppet theater written and performed for adult audiences reaching its peak in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The puppets are one-half to full life-size. Are they creepy? Yup. But not as creepy as Chucky or a zombie.

Source: “Uncanny Valley,” Wikipedia 10/15/06.

Related Post: “More on Robots: Send in the Clones,” EBT Blog 10/27/06.

Graphs: Masahiro Mori and “The Uncanny Valley: Dissecting Humanoids Among Us…” [source]

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