HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
YOU. ROBOT
landing — should we really be
striving to make them look and
sound like human beings?
In 1970 a Tokyo-based robotics professor named Masohiro
Miro wrote an oft-cited essay
on the subject that has since
become commonplace when
scientists and other researchers
speak on the future of humanrobot interaction.
“I have noticed that,
in climbing toward the
goal of making robots
appear human,” Miro
wrote in Robotics and
Automation Magazine,
“our affinity for them
increases until we come
to a valley, which I call
the uncanny valley.”
Essentially, Miro posited, we feel greater attachment to mechanical things
the more human they become,
but we soon reach a stopping
point, and it sends us running
for the hills. That stopping
point is the “uncanny valley.”
A Tickle-me-Elmo, for example, is enticing because it
reacts to being tickled like a
person would, also it’s adorable, and it’s Elmo. But let’s
say Tickle-me-Elmo had a hu-
man face, or arms that moved
fluidly, like a person’s arms.
We might recoil. Because if the
thing tries to become too human and fails, as the uncanny
valley theory proposes, then
our brain produces its own er-
MY GOAL IS TO
CREATE FRIEND MACHINES.
FRIENDLY GENIUS
MACHINES. MACHINES WITH
GENIUS CAPABILITIES.
ror message and the uncanny
valley sends us away, unnerved.
In his essay, Miro concluded that designers should
“ponder” the idea that robots
would be more effective the
less human they appear. “I
predict it is possible to create
a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a nonhuman
design,” he wrote.
Many creative people already
agree with Miro — that these
robots should have human
qualities, but not look or act