Have you ever seen The Polar Express? Did it feel kind of creepy? It did for me – I remember the first time I saw it on telly, channel flicking to a scene halfway through where Tom Hanks is handing out tea to the kids on the train. After a few seconds of vague discomfort I said “eurgh! what’s wrong with them?!”
That weird feeling…of something creepy, something pseudo-familiar, something not-quite right, has a Name. It’s called the Uncanny Valley.
The term was coined by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist who apart from starting a robot-building competition in Japan, studied the relations of religion, psychology and metaphysics to the development of robots.
He was particularly interested in the relationship between humans and robots, and carried out a study into our emotional responses to ‘non-human entities’. His findings are shown in the graph above.
Mori found that humans are increasingly positive towards robots the more lifelike they become…that is, until they become TOO lifelike. Then robots elicit not empathy, but revulsion.
If you think that Tom Hanks in The Polar Express is pretty damn creepy, you’re in the Uncanny Valley.
Several theories have been put forward to explain this reaction, from our cognitive mate-selection ability repulsing us from robots, to our pathogen-avoidance defences kicking in when we see something that looks like it could be diseased. Whatever it is, it seems that thanks to the Uncanny Valley, robots won’t be infiltrating society any time soon.
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