Limits to Emulating Humans

Just came across an article while having one of my break periods at training for my new job. It started to make sense after 2 viewings of "I, Robot". It was a rather startling revelation for me, since it makes some sense as why I get unsettled with mannequins occasionally and digital ghosts in games. The article I came across presented to me an explanation. After reading the article and some spare-time research, I got a better picture of this feeling we may all have. Its actually a phrase called "The Uncanny Valley". This phrase was coined by Japanese Roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1978.

Mori discovered this phenomenon after conducting experimentson gauging psychological reactions of humans to robots with the emphasis on anthropomorphism, movement and appearance. The initial trend was basically a positive slope, which is the better level of these three qualities, the more we find them pleasing and comfortable to be with. It sounds good but the phenomenon manifests somewhere to a point in which the plotting of the graph dip deeply to negative. This negative trend indicates that at some certain level of any of these three qualities, the admiration would turn to revulsion. This unexpected negative trend in a seemingly supposedly positively sloped graph is what created this valley in the plot. The graphs showing this is located here.

The article hints a bit that when a robot appears to be 99% human, our human sensibilities would try to seek out the missing 1% on account of a sense of wrongness we would recognize.

This psychological response also accounts as to how we perceive things in the visual mediums. This accounts how people can be amazed or appalled at watching/viewing digital analogues of human beings when done up differently for movies and games for starters.

As to visual mediums with illustrations of humans, this articles say this as:

"Comic-strip artists have known this for years. As comic-book theorist Scott McCloud points out, we identify more deeply with simply drawn cartoon characters, like those in Peanuts, than with more realistic ones. Charlie Brown doesn't trigger our obsession with the missing details the way a not-quite-photorealistic character does, so we project ourselves onto him more easily. That's part of the genius behind modernist artists such as Picasso or Matisse. They realized that the best way to capture the essence of a person or object was with a single, broad-stroked detail."

But this psychological hurdle is currently being challenged currently by David Hanson with his robotic head project

It was a rather startling revelation in our human perceptions and psyche when it deals outside the usual human interactions we know. Its also a sobering thought as to how future will be heading as such.