Uncanny Valley

“Also attesting to this false impression is the fact that many people struggle through life by persistently pushing without understanding the effectiveness of pulling back.”

This is one of the passages from Uncanny Valley that stood out for me the most because this is an area I have yet to see in our quest for robotics/technological advancement. This push to accelerate is what humans are striving so hard to fulfill, but not thinking about the consequences. I appreciated Mori’s analogy of our technological push to make robots human and absolutely loved the term uncanny valley. I’m not a fan of this hurdle to humanize the robot and it creeps me out the thought of interacting with a human-like robot (Robocop scared the heck out of me and Cog in Turkle’s book was very eerie). Uncanny Valley had me thinking whether we can ever accept being human. Our human instincts (i.e. the uncanny valley) and life (i.e. birth and death) are inevitable, so why keep pushing the inevitable away? Yet, when, as Mori mentions, you see someone who is disabled, does this push towards humanistic robotics make sense?

I remember watching a news report on a U.N. or U.S. Embassy bombing someplace in either Africa or the Middle East and the reporter was interviewing an official who had survived the attack. She ended up blind due to the attack and the reporter had asked her a question about how she is coping with having lost her sight. Throughout her response—which she mentioned, honestly, how it was difficult to adjust having been someone with sight for most of her life and then, all of a sudden, it being taken away—I was trying to imagine if I was ever put in that position, what would I do? How would I feel? I get anxiety attacks when my ears are clogged up from a bad cold, so could I live without sight (or hearing) that I’ve known most of my life? If robotics were available to allow me to see (or hear) again, can I honestly say I would not consider its possibilities?

As much as I am still very much at bay of the thought of human robots and the overall non-human agenda in technology and robotics, I am also a part of the agenda and do consider its possibilities if I ever needed it.