9 January 2013

Uncanny android sightings, from Freud to Hollywood

Long before anyone had heard of the “uncanny valley”, people knew that human-like artificial beings can make us feel uncomfortable. Richard Fisher

Read more:Freaky feeling: Why androids make us uneasy




(Image: Baron/Getty Images)


In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori published an essay in Japanese titled "Bukimi no tani" – "The valley of eeriness" – in which he introduced the idea that some artificial bodies were more likely to provoke discomfort than others.

Mori argued that humanoid robots do not necessarily provoke that uncanny feeling; indeed, we may even feel warmer towards them than towards industrial robots with no human form.

An example of a likeable android might be Elektro, pictured. One of the first celebrity robots, it drew huge crowds at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

(Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)


Yet Mori also believed that when robots are designed to resemble humans closely, they make us feel uncomfortable.

For example, he argued that lifelike robotic hands with artificial skin could be repulsive to us. He wrote, "We could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity."

(Image: Aflo/Alamy)


Mori plotted these stark differences in our responses as a graph. In his reckoning, artificial beings that bear a strong likeness to humans fall into an "uncanny valley".


Mori's ideas remained relatively obscure for 35 years. Then, in 2005, robotics researcher Karl MacDorman was working with Hiroshi Ishiguro (right) in Japan to build lifelike robots called "actroids" (an example is on the left). When MacDorman heard about Mori's essay, he translated it into English and so brought its ideas to wider attention, sparking a great deal of research into their possible causes.

(Image: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)


The "uncanny valley" theory also explains why lifelike computer-generated characters in movies such as Polar Express (pictured) creeped out audiences. Animation houses like Pixar have avoided characters with close human likenesses, opting for more cartoonish depictions.

It remains unclear why the uncanny valley exists, but some think artificial beings may never be able to evoke the affinity we feel for fellow human beings – see "Freaky feeling: Why androids make us uneasy" to find out why.

(Image: Moviestore Collection/Rex Features)