We have been trying to model our successors robot servants to resemble human beings physically and psychically for a while now. While the psychical development is taking its first steps out of its literal infancy, the physical resemblance has still a long way to go. It has to cross the uncanny valley:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.

This valley is the major hurdle towards believable and likeable humanoid model, be it robots, 3D animations or game avatars.

A common bail-out here is to depict characteristics generally considered humanoid by transmuting or exaggerating these features. Comics and the typical Pixar CGI movies are a very good example. The suspension of disbelief is the key factor here: We accept that comic-like depictions are there to interpret reality and show us a filtered, deliberately unrealistic image of the plot. It is very easy for our imagination to fill in the gaps and to ignore physical inaccuracies.

This gets much harder when we try to be as realistic as possible by using correct proportions, complex shading and detailed textures. The movie Beowulf almost perfectly falls into this category: It is completely CGI, but uses real actors and tries to simulate reality. While still-images still look alright, it is the animations where it goes downhill. The trailer has some examples in it, especially the horse animations look wrong, which is much more obvious in the actual movie (while technically not directly a humanoid animation, the galloping horses still add to the feeling that something is wrong with the depicted “reality”).

While not directly concerned with the uncanny valley, some military robots are quite creepy in my opinion. For example the Boston Dynamics “Big Dog”, which somehow looks like two soldiers bending over and pushing against each other. In a sense, it is the opposite to Beowulf: The movement, especially when it tries to regain its balance or slips on ice, looks quite natural, but the visual appearance (and sound) is really disturbing.

Scientists from the MIT are trying - but not quite managing - to avoid the valley with a robot using the comic-approach. They have developed the Nexi, a what they call MDS robot - mobile, dexterous, social. Both the pictures of this robot and the video of Nexi talking and gesticulating look a bit creepy, the robot reminds me of Jigsaw from the movie Saw.

They say that the “purpose of this platform is to support research and education goals in human-robot interaction, teaming, and social learning.”

The antipathy the uncanny valley introduces leads to a potential problem when regarding this social aspect of human-robot interaction: Once humans start to enhance themselves with transhuman enhancements, for example improved eye-sight, nanobots that increase the IQ or prostheses that work better than their natural counterparts, there may be a sudden rift between enhanced and “normal” humans, caused by the antipathy mentioned above. This hypothesis was introduced by Jamais Cascio, who further states that once such technologies gain further distance from human norms, “transhuman” individuals would cease to be judged on human levels and instead be regarded as separate entities altogether (this point is what has been dubbed “posthuman“), and it is here that acceptance would rise once again out of the uncanny valley.

I think the idea of the uncanny valley makes it harder for malicious AIs to undermine human civilisation, as fear of robots is more easily sparked with the help of uncanny-valley-antipathy (AI Panic -1%). However, the concept might be known to an intelligence, and thus we might see robots that does not look like human beings at all - or worse, like our childhood Disney-heroes!

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