Uncanny Valley Girls
By:
March 18, 2009
The concept of the Uncanny Valley was proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, author of Buddha in the Machine (in which Mori asserts that a robot can achieve enlightenment). Mori noted the revulsion many observers feel for imperfectly realistic facsimiles of human beings. His “Uncanny Valley” describes a dip which he argued would be found in a graph of any observer’s emotions as a robot or other humanoid simulacrum approached lifelikeness.
The concept of the uncanny valley has been influential in robotics, but there is little evidence that the effect exists. While robots designed in the West have veered away from human likeness toward bauplanen inspired by nonhuman mammals, insects, and even fish, androids produced by Asia’s thriving robotics industry seem to leap right into the deepest shadows of the uncanny valley. In Asia, robots flirt, serve drinks, and haul farmers around in handcarts as their designers nudge ever close to perfect anthropomorphic verisimilitude.
The most recent example of this trend in Asian robotics is HRP-4C, a robot fashion model out of Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
Freud described the uncanny as a feeling caused by any repetition that threatens the integrity we associate with selfhood. Déjà vu, trick mirror effects, coincidences and synchronicities and appearances of pattern amidst random phenomena–all of these we may lend a strange, haunted flavor to otherwise-normal circumstances. To Freud, such feelings betrayed the ego’s discomfort with the existence of its shadowy aspect, the id. The German word for the uncanny, unheimlich or “un-home-ness,” describes the sense of dislocation or alienation of such instances.
To Freud, unheimlich was a universal. But the uncanny valley may be not a neurological but a cultural effect. Although proposed by a Japanese researcher, it may be tied to Western prohibitions against creating human likenesses dating back to ancient times–proscriptions that are particularly strong among the Western monotheisms. From the taboo on idolatry to the Golem legend to Frankenstein, Western culture frequently bespeaks a fear of the doppelgänger or double.
This isn’t to say that uncanny effects don’t exist–quite the opposite. The uncanny is a profound aspect of human cognition. But Asian robot designers show us that we can learn to live with it. Perhaps robot designers in Japan, China, and Korea tend to lack some of the hang-ups of their counterparts in the West.
In 2007, researchers tested for the uncanny valley effect by exposing observers to digitally-composed faces “morphed” by stages from nonhuman to near-human likeness. The observers did not report uncanny feelings from imperfect simulacra–unless those simulacra also included notable abnormalities like drastically out of scale eyes or other features. Notably, the observers in the study were students at Tokyo University.