Is the Uncanny Valley an Urban Legend?
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
In 1970 Masahiro Mori, a robotocist publishing in the journal Energy, put forward the theory of the Uncanny Valley – that the closer non-human things get to being like a human the more icked out we are by the experience. Its become an urban legend and until the Eric Sofge article at Popular Mechanics titled The Truth About Robots and the Uncanny Valley: Analysis I would have sworn this was a fact.
On a superficial level, of course, the Uncanny Valley makes sense to us – we’re pretty icked by icky robotic nymph-maids, a little too sexy for a robot but a lot too robotic for a human. But Masahiro never pushed this forward into an actual theory, it was and is only a conceptual idea. More interesting still, the Sofge article mentions Karl MacDorman, director of the Android Science Center at Indiana University, who performed research that proved differences between gender perception by humans of robot patients. It appears the depth of the relationship within robot-human interaction is more complex than the superficial truths that surround the Uncanny Valley.
The real cruncher is that all of the roboticists and computer scientists interviewed for the Sofge article asserted that even when the Uncanny Valley is apparent at a distance or on a computer monitor it simply disappears on human-to-robot contact. Proximity trumps the Uncanny Valley. In fact, the Uncanny Valley had never been proven and had become an urban legend to which my own measure of perpetuated inaccuracy has contributed momentum.
However, from the world of Masahiro Mori in 1970 to the present day digital reality, it is worth taking into consideration that exposure to robots, computers, software, science fiction and the exponential increase in the availability of knowledge to the average Joe has desensitised us to the WOW factor of what may have originally been a much more powerful and significant Uncanny Valley. We hardly even doubt the reality of sexy maid-like robots with questionable marketing possibilities.
