Your First Visit to the Uncanny Valley

First hypothesised in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the phenomenon of the ‘uncanny valley’ is described as a feeling of fear when someone encounters an object that closely resembles a human – but isn’t human at all.

Mori identified that when robots become more human-like, people find them to be more acceptable to a certain point. When the robots become close to, but not quite human, people began to develop a sense of uneasiness. The uncanny valley is recorded as a ‘dip’ in the emotional response when looking at humanoid objects.

Thalia Wheatley, a psychologist at Dartmouth College, conducted research on the uncanny valley. Wheatley’s results found that everyone from college students to a remote tribe in Cambodia showed a ‘strong sensitivity’ to what does, or does not, appear human.

Wheatley explained that ‘evolutionary history has tuned us to detect minor distortions that indicate disease, mental or physical problems…to go after a human-looking robot or avatar is to go up against millions of years of evolutionary history.’

The uncanny valley is something that can either be exploited or avoided – roboticists can choose what response they want to elicit from the viewers, or consumers, of their products.

One such person is Matt McMullen, the CEO and founder of RealDoll – aka, the company that produces the world’s most popular and lifelike sex dolls. In 2016, McMullen stated that it is his goal to avoid the uncanny valley with his dolls – he insisted that his company, Abyss Creations, develops the dolls in a way that encourages companionship.

The creators of these robots are designing and programming them to be as real as possible. McMullen’s team creates customisable dolls with thirty different faces, sixteen body types, and eighteen different personality types. But McMullen insists there is nothing ethically wrong with this – because the robot is not a ‘someone’, it’s just a machine.

The dolls are eerily real and are marketed in a very specific manner – they have names, the photos of the product are professional photoshoots, and some have been modelled off real-life porn actresses (link is NSFW). It has been argued that once robots reach a certain level of sophistication, people intuitively start treating them like persons or agents.

Image credit to RealDoll.com

From the view of someone looking in from the outside, McMullen walks a fine line in trying to avoid the uncanny valley – insisting that the doll is supposed to be fun and engaging, and not meant to trick you into thinking its real. The people who buy the dolls from Abyss Creations are on one side of the fence, and the rest of us are on the outside.

But where does that leave the robots?

Eventually when these robots become conscious, who will be the people there to protect them? Can they rely on the humans who simply see them as sex objects, or the humans who are disgusted and fearful of them?

If we are fearful of robots and unable to amend human/machine relationships, is anyone really going to care if conscious entities are left in the hands of people who see them only as passive sex objects?

Who will listen when the robot is saying ‘no’?