The Uncanny Valley

When a human stares at a technologically-advanced replica of a person (a robot), he becomes increasingly positive in his reaction to the facsimile’s human-ness. I was thinking about puppets, and then not so much about puppets. It was a failed weather day: the morning was like early April, sunny climbing toward 60, then rain came and by noon it was more like late February. The actual date was March 20. I was thinking about how important a puppet’s face was, or its facial expression. Then there is a moment when the human stops believing and a nervous shock of dread runs through the person’s system. A puppet can easily watch a train go by, is made for that sort of attentive nonchalance. My mother didn’t feel well, she never felt well, we had recently found she suffered from Parkinson’s disease. But she would not allow that she was afflicted, much less that it depressed her. I thought about the thick hedges next-door to my house when I was growing up, they were un-attended to, and there were large snails under there, living in a dirty low society. Since it’s March the redbuds are getting traced, they’ve already shed one layer of paint on the street at their feet. I kept thinking about puppets, how creepy they could be if they caught you in suspense, how easy it was to relax and listen to them and not look for their handlers. A hypothesized graphed curve of the person’s level of emotional familiarity violently dips. I made a list of some money we might have soon and things we could buy. I saw a woman who had just had a miscarriage: she didn’t see me: she looked fine. When a puppet’s head moves, the whole puppet usually moves, but not these modern Japanese articulated puppets, the heads have a whole range of articulated human-like movements: their necks snap, or arch, they can lengthen in pleasure and in rectitude, their heads crane and bob, and appear ambivalent. They nod and shake in one sinuous motion. Roboticist Mashimo Mori coined the term “uncanny valley” for the dip, to describe the human’s adjusting mind suddenly and violently rejecting the similarity as too real, too right, too human. There are ways of being compassionate without seeming compassionate. And vice versa. When an older woman looks in the mirror, I don’t know what she sees. Sometimes, though, she has to grip the edge of the sink in front of her to steady herself at the sight of it. My son came outside where I sat, staring over a notebook, and he told me – just like that – that the ancient Mayans never destroyed a building, they just encased it in the core of the new structure, and built up around it. At first that seems to help, but in the end does not. Then, after the “uncanny valley,” the response builds again increasingly toward acceptance and familiarity of the humanoid.