HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
YOU. ROBOT
senses the room with his android senses and then he realizes every other person in the
room is also an android.
“In the future technology
will saturate deeply the way we
think about everything,” he emphasized in that talk. “We want
at some point to have all these
machines walking around completely autonomous.
But there are problems
with that.”
Ayse Saygin, a professor at the University of
California San Diego in
the Department of Cognitive Science, led an
exploration of the “uncanny valley” in a study
last year. She attached
people to an MRI machine, and tested their
brain activity when exposed to video of a regular human, an android
replica of that human,
and the same android
stripped of its “human
qualities.” What she discovered was that the test subjects’
brains “lit up” when exposed
to the human-looking androids
because they were working “extra hard” to make sense of what
they were seeing.
“What we found was that
if you’re going to get so close
to what the brain considers a person, you better get it
right,” Saygin says. “Because
the brain is not very tolerant of
WE ARE OFFERING
PEOPLE THE OPPORTUNITY
TO CRAM TWICE AS
MUCH LIFE INTO EACH
DAY, ABSORB TWICE AS
MANY INTERESTING
THINGS, AND CONTINUE
LIVING BEYOND THE DAYS
OF THEIR BODIES.
deviations from that. We’re not
evolved to see something that
looks human that isn’t human.”
Saygin pointed to human
beings who’ve had too much
plastic surgery. We notice that
there’s something not right
with the way their faces move.
If humanoid robots are ever to