This is a well known
psychological phenomenon amongst people who take an interest in AI, and the
possibility of androids in particular. Its discovery and consequential history
is discussed in the latest issue of New
Scientist (12 January 2013, pp. 35-7) by Joe Kloc, a New York
correspondent.
The term was
originally coined by Japanese Roboticist, Masahiro Mori, in 1970, in an essay titled, “Bukimi No Tani” – 'The Valley of Eeriness' (direct translation). But
it wasn’t until 2005 that it entered the Western lexicon, when it was
translated by Karl MacDorman, then working at Osaka University, after he
received a late night fax of the essay. It was MacDorman, apparently, who gave
it the apposite English rhyming title, “the uncanny valley”.
If an animate object
or visualised character is anthropomorphised, like Mickey Mouse for example, we
suspend disbelief enough to go along with it, even though we are not fooled
into thinking the character is really human. But when people started to
experiment with creating lifelike androids (in Japan and elsewhere) there was
an unexpected averse reaction from ordinary people. It’s called a ‘valley’ in
both translations, because if you graph people’s empathy as the likeness
increases (albeit empathy is a subjective metric) then the graph rises as
expected, but plummets dramatically at the point where the likeness becomes
uncomfortably close to humans. Then it rises again to normal for a real human.
The New Scientist article is really about
trying to find an explanation and it does so historically. MacDorman first
conjectured that the eeriness or unease arose from the perception that the androids looked like a dead person
come to life. But he now rejects that, along with the idea that ‘strange’
looking humans may harbour disease, thus provoking an unconscious
evolutionary-derived response. Work by neuroscientists using fMRI machines,
specifically Thierry Chaminade of the Advanced Telecommunications Research
Instituted in Kyoto and Ayse Saygin at the University of California, San Diego,
suggest another cause: empathy itself.
There are 3 different
categories of empathy, according to neuroscientists: cognitive, motor and
emotional. The theory is that androids create a dissonance between two or more
of these categories, and the evidence suggests that it’s emotional empathy that
breaks the spell. This actually makes sense to me because we don’t have this
problem with any of the many animals humans interact with. With animals we feel
an emotional empathy more strongly than the other two. Robotic androids reverse
this perception.
The author also
suggests, in the early exposition of the article, that cartoon characters that
too closely resemble humans also suffer from this problem and gave the box
office failure of Polar Express as an
example. But I suspect the failure of a movie has more to do with its script
than its visuals, though I never saw Polar
Express (it didn’t appeal to me). All the PIXAR movies have been hugely successful, but it’s because of their scripts as much as their animation, and the
visual realism of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord
of the Rings trilogy (and now The
Hobbit) hasn’t caused any problems, apparently. That’s because movie
characters; animated, motion-capture or human; evoke emotional empathy in the audience.
In my own fiction I
have also created robotic characters. Some of them are deliberately
machine-like and unempathetic in the extreme. In fact, I liked the idea of
having a robotic character that you couldn’t negotiate with – it was a
deliberate plot device on my part. But I created another character who had no
human form at all – in fact, ‘he’ was really a piece of software – this was
also deliberate. I found readers empathised with this disembodied character
because ‘he’ developed a relationship with the protagonist, which was an
interesting literary development in itself.
Addendum: Images for the uncanny valley.
