ABSTRACT
In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noted a curious phenomenon, in which “as robots appear more humanlike, our sense of their familiarity increases until we come to a valley,” where their familiarity suddenly drops, and named this valley “the uncanny valley.” Trying to prevent robots from falling into this valley, Mori proposed a “wooden hand [instead of a human-like hand] … as a reference for future design.” The uncanny valley has since drawn much attention from those working in such robot-related fields as robotics, computer science and even the film industry, and many have adopted Mori’s proposal. For instance, Jun’ichior Seyama and Ruth S. Nagayama, in their research on “the impressions of artificial human faces,” established that “the uncanny valley emerged only when the face images involved abnormal features,” while Carl F. Di Salvo and et al., whose main project was to develop a nursebot called Pearl, experimented with 48 types of robot heads and concluded that features like wide head and eyes, less chin and forehead, and smooth skin increase robots’ familiarity. In his pursuit of “the idea of believable agents,” Joseph Bates, on the other hand, was more interested in “the role of emotion” than facial features, and recommended that artistic inputs be incorporated to “build engaging, apparently living creatures” (124). Such creatures wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, be “just a pretty face,” added Justine Cassell and his team, whose work on constructing an embodied, multi-modal real-time conversational interface agent tested the hypothesis that “embodied interface agents can provide a qualitative advantage over non-embodied interfaces, if the bodies are used in ways that leverage knowledge of human communicative behavior” (58). All these attempts, and many more, may be able to delay our arrival at the uncanny valley, but that doesn’t mean there is no such valley. Christoph Bartner and others thus regarded “The uncanny valley … [as] more of a cliff than a valley,” and decided it “unwise to attempt to build highly human-like androids.” Wise or unwise, however, the idea of building human-like robots or androids has never been, and probably will never be, given up, so it is very likely that the most human-like of our creations will find themselves someday in the depths of the uncanny valley, feared and forsaken by their makers.
