What is it about lifelike robots and the humanoid characters in movies like The Polar Express that feels so disturbing? Robotics scientist Masahiro Mori dubbed this phenomenon the uncanny valley. There are lots of interesting articles explaining this creepy sensation in Slate, Wired, and on the NPR blog. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Uncanny Valley”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
You know that uneasy feeling you get when you see a character in a video game? And that figure is so close to having human features but not quite that it just gives you the willies?
Oh, yes. Mm—
Maybe you’re trying to do your banking online and one of those creepy virtual assistants pops up to help. And they look almost human but they kind of make your skin crawl?
Yeah, yeah.
I didn’t know until this week that there’s a term for this queasy feeling. Do you know it, Grant? You probably do.
They do, as a matter of fact.
It is.
Uncanny Valley.
Yes.
I love this term. I just came across it this week. It was coined by Mashahiro Mori, who is a Japanese researcher who studies the reactions of humans to realistic robots.
He suggests we imagine this creepy sensation in terms of a mathematical graph. On one axis, you have increasingly realistic human-like images, and on the other, you plot their likability.
So, for example, on the left side of the graph, you start out with, say, R2D2. It doesn’t look very human.
Right.
And it doesn’t need to be human.
Yeah.
So you’re not creeped out.
Yeah.
You’re not creeped out. And the line goes up and up and up. You get to WALL-E and E.T. And they look a little more human.
And C2PO.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they’re a little more human but still more likable. And then the graph keeps going up and up.
But then you get to the point where the image is almost human but not quite. And the graph goes way down. Their likability just plummets.
And that precipitous drop is something he refers to as the uncanny valley. That is, it’s strange in an unsettling way.
In other words, the closer you get to looking human, the more humans expect you to look human.
Yeah.
And so when you’re near that but not perfect, then people give you a thumbs down because you’re creeping them out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Did you see the Polar Express?
Yes, a great example of how poorly that can be done.
Uncanny Valley.
I love that. All the poets out there are probably going to start writing poems about uncanny valley. I just love it.
You have new language that you found or do you want to talk about grammar, slang, pronunciation, usage? Give us a call 877-929-9673. Email us words@waywordradio.org. Find us on Facebook and Twitter, or you can check out our website at waywordradio.org.
