Uncanny Valley

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Introduction Many are disturbed by the appearance of near human looking robots. Since I have a personal interest in robotics, I find this topic fascinating, so I set out to discover why this phenomenon exists. It is called the Uncanny Valley and is coined by the famed roboticist Masahiro Mori. The closer a robot resembles a human being, the more horrifying the average person finds it. If the robot is indistinguishable from a human, people are content and there is no more revulsion. The valley refers to the dip in the graph. A baby doll may resemble human traits, but it looks different enough from a human being that children find them pleasant looking. A jerky robot intended to look human, wearing clothing and artificial skin, hair and …show more content…

It made sense to Asimov that robots have legs, hands, eyes and fingers, but before Mori wrote his essay, Asimov understood the dilemma of the Uncanny Valley. He has written many books about humanoid robots in the far future. His most prominent character is named Daneel Olivaw, a robot that looks so human, even when a human discovers that Daneel is really a robot, they still respect him like a man. This type of robot (which does not yet exist) represents a robot that has made it past the uncanny valley. They look so much like a human that people treat them like (or mistake them for) a human. On the other hand, Asimov had other characters, like the more primitive robot Giskard. Giskard had metallic skin and had jerky movements. Along with his tinny voice, he looked like a poor imitation of a man. In fact in his literature, it was illegal for uncanny robots to wear clothes. This was considered by earth people and spacers alike to be simply disturbing. They wanted to prevent robots from looking too much like

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