Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
Speaker 1: I want to take you back to a conversation we had.
Speaker 1: I think it was last December. He was right after
Speaker 1: I went to see the new, the most recent Star
Speaker 1: Wars movie, Rogue one. Oh yes, uh, And I am
Speaker 1: on the cusp, the very cusp of seeing it myself
Speaker 1: and waiting for it to become rent rental options. So,
Speaker 1: oh it's not yet. No, still got still a week
Speaker 1: or two out. So has everything been spoiled for you
Speaker 1: so far? No? People have been a little um cooler
Speaker 1: on this one. Um. I think some things are probably
Speaker 1: spoiled for me, but not like that last one where
Speaker 1: everybody just really felt the need to, you know, just
Speaker 1: lay it all out on social media. Let me let
Speaker 1: me spoil one thing for you here and they go
Speaker 1: to space and there's a war there, ye, stars among
Speaker 1: the stars. But there is one thing in the movie. Okay,
Speaker 1: so mild spoiler for Rogue one coming out. It's something
Speaker 1: that probably everybody already knows. It's also not really about
Speaker 1: the content of the movie, but just about which characters
Speaker 1: you see. But if you are ready, are you ready
Speaker 1: for the smild spoiler? Okay, we get to see if
Speaker 1: you remember back to the original Star Wars back go
Speaker 1: back to the seventies, Peter Cushing as Grand mof Tarkin,
Speaker 1: the guy who was in fact Darth Vader's boss on
Speaker 1: the Star Him. Yeah, he's enough of this, Vada release him.
Speaker 1: And we love Peter Cushing because he was in all
Speaker 1: these old monster movies. He he goes back to the
Speaker 1: Hammer movies. He was. He was Dr Frankenstein, like the
Speaker 1: villainous Dr Frankenstein of the Hammer films, and he I
Speaker 1: think was the hero of the version of the Mummy
Speaker 1: that has Christopher Lee as as the Mummy. Uh, the one.
Speaker 1: I've got the poster for it in the house, except
Speaker 1: it's the Belgian posters, so it's La Malediction de Feron.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so Peter Cushing was the original Grand mof Tarkin,
Speaker 1: this bad Empire guy who was Darth Vader's ball us.
Speaker 1: And the thing they do in the New Rogue One
Speaker 1: is they bring him back. He's dead, he has passed away.
Speaker 1: This movie takes place a little bit before the original
Speaker 1: Star Wars is supposed to have taken place, but they
Speaker 1: bring this character back and they have an actor stand
Speaker 1: in as him, but it's not just a recast role.
Speaker 1: They try to make it look as if this is
Speaker 1: Peter Cushing standing here delivering the lines with c g I.
Speaker 1: And this is an odd choice because, all right, so
Speaker 1: you're gonna have Darth Vader in there, that's easy to do.
Speaker 1: Darth Vader is a dude in a suit, voiced by
Speaker 1: James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones is still alive, so
Speaker 1: you can check that one off the list. But Grandma Tarkin,
Speaker 1: like you said, uh that the actor is dead. So
Speaker 1: it seems to me like the first easiest thing to
Speaker 1: do is just don't have those scenes. If you know
Speaker 1: it's gonna be problematic, don't even mess with it, or um,
Speaker 1: just use an actual living actor such as Wayne pie
Speaker 1: Graham who played him in Revenge of the Sith. Or
Speaker 1: go with Ben Cross, who's another actor that I've seen
Speaker 1: over the years brought up as potential Tarkan casting, or
Speaker 1: head go with Ralph Finds, Like, clearly you have the
Speaker 1: money to throw down the well of expensive c g
Speaker 1: I equipment. Just go ahead and hire Ralph Finds. I
Speaker 1: know he's pricy, but he's great and the consummate evil Brett. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he even kind of looks like a younger Peter Cushing.
Speaker 1: He's got that same kind of angular face, like the
Speaker 1: thin long face with the jaw and the scowl. It's
Speaker 1: all there. And it's not like fans of various franchise
Speaker 1: are not clearly cool with recasting. It's not like we're
Speaker 1: gonna be thrown into, you know, a traumatic spin, because
Speaker 1: you can look to a Game of Thrones, James Bond, Twilight,
Speaker 1: Harry Potter, etcetera, like we we get it. We can
Speaker 1: roll with a recast. Now. I want to go into
Speaker 1: completely different directions thinking about this c g I grandmof Tarken.
Speaker 1: One is that I didn't like it in the movie. Okay,
Speaker 1: I saw it and I was just like, don't want this.
Speaker 1: It pulled me out of the movie. It made me
Speaker 1: stop being in the story and just thinking about how
Speaker 1: did they do that? I don't On one hand, it
Speaker 1: looked great, Like when you see the movie, I think
Speaker 1: you will kind of have to agree. It's unless I'm
Speaker 1: missing something. It's the best c g I simulation of
Speaker 1: a real person that I've ever seen, Like, it looks amazing,
Speaker 1: but it still looks not quite good enough that I
Speaker 1: can just accept it and go with it. I kept
Speaker 1: continually thinking, like, what am I looking at? It's almost
Speaker 1: really him, but it's not quite really him, and it
Speaker 1: made me feel icky. So in this it made you
Speaker 1: descend into what we've come to know as a as
Speaker 1: a as a species as the Uncanny Valley. Right, So
Speaker 1: today is going to be the first of two episodes
Speaker 1: we want to do about the Uncanny Valley, And this
Speaker 1: first one we wanted descend into the Uncanny Valley, but
Speaker 1: not just talk about it in terms of the standard
Speaker 1: pop culture phenomenon, because this is one of those side
Speaker 1: tech concepts that is totally filtered down into the mainstream.
Speaker 1: Everybody talks about the Uncanny Valley. It's a totally norm mole,
Speaker 1: ground level pop culture phenomenon now, especially with as much
Speaker 1: bad C g I as we encounter in the movie.
Speaker 1: But there it's also a scientific field of study. It's
Speaker 1: something that people are looking into with empirical research to
Speaker 1: try to figure out does it really exist, If it
Speaker 1: does really exist, what causes it, what can be done
Speaker 1: about it? So we want to look at it from
Speaker 1: both of these angles today, right, So we should probably
Speaker 1: roll through some just fun examples of this. We're gonna
Speaker 1: try and not to go too long on this. If
Speaker 1: we do, we'll cut it and save it for trailer talk.
Speaker 1: Either way, we'll probably do a Facebook live trailer talk
Speaker 1: on an upcoming Friday about some of these movies. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I want to go back to a much earlier
Speaker 1: experience for me, Robert, did you see The Mummy Returns
Speaker 1: in two thousand one? Remember this one? I don't think
Speaker 1: I saw The Mummy Returns. I saw the Money and
Speaker 1: I remember digging it at the time, but not not
Speaker 1: the old hammer one or the Universal one. No, no,
Speaker 1: the yeah, the the the re the reboot of the Money.
Speaker 1: Is his name, Brendan Frasier. Yeah, and what Arnold Voslo?
Speaker 1: Yeah he was he. I I enjoyed him as they
Speaker 1: kind of brought in some of these aspects of the
Speaker 1: tragic Mummy figure, which I liked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand one we got the Scorpion King.
Speaker 1: This is a character that appears in the Mummy Returns
Speaker 1: and he's pretty much if you want to picture it,
Speaker 1: if you haven't seen the movie. Actually you should look
Speaker 1: up video of this. We're gonna tell you to go
Speaker 1: look up images and video quite a few times in
Speaker 1: these episodes because some visual aids will help. But if
Speaker 1: you want to picture it, picture the concept of a centaur,
Speaker 1: except replace the horse parts with scorpion parts and some
Speaker 1: other random arthropod bits, and the man part on top
Speaker 1: is Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Except it's not Dwayne the
Speaker 1: Rock Johnson. There's a there's a bit of a problem
Speaker 1: with the rocks. So the corpion Corpion, the Scorpion King
Speaker 1: scuttles into action in the film, and you can tell
Speaker 1: immediately something is wrong because it's not just the rock.
Speaker 1: It's this c g I upper body designed to look
Speaker 1: like the rock. It's supposed to be him, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't look right. It looks like somebody took the rock,
Speaker 1: skinned him, and then took the skin suit and then
Speaker 1: boiled it and then maybe ironed it and rubbed it
Speaker 1: down with wax, and then stretched it over somebody else,
Speaker 1: like a bald Crispin Glover wearing a waxed up the
Speaker 1: rock suit. And and that would be fine if that's
Speaker 1: what they were going for. But I guess the disconnect
Speaker 1: here is that clearly they wanted this to be like
Speaker 1: the Rock as a scorpion center and not this um,
Speaker 1: creepy in human above the nation that you've described, right,
Speaker 1: And it's sort of I guess works because it's okay
Speaker 1: if he's creepy, because he's a monster. But he was
Speaker 1: creepy in a way that he clearly wasn't supposed to be.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just that, oh he's a monster. He looks weird.
Speaker 1: Something looked wrong with him. And this was at a
Speaker 1: time when computer generated animations were hot, right two thousand one.
Speaker 1: They seemed to be getting better all the time, and
Speaker 1: yet they were terrible, producing these characters that were not
Speaker 1: only not convincingly human, they were literally physically unpleasant to
Speaker 1: look at. They were repulsive. Yeah, it was a period
Speaker 1: when everyone was just foolishly optimistic about what we could
Speaker 1: achieve with c g I, and you know, into in
Speaker 1: a sense, maybe that hasn't gone away. We're still very
Speaker 1: the Rogue one example, Like, clearly everyone is very optimistic
Speaker 1: about how great this looked, and even though to your point,
Speaker 1: it does look great, but within the context of the film,
Speaker 1: something doesn't quite work. Yeah, I would say, Now for
Speaker 1: some people, we can get into this more. I think,
Speaker 1: especially in the next episode when we then the next one,
Speaker 1: we want to try to go beyond the valley, the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley. But I will say at this point, for
Speaker 1: some people, Tarkan was not over the line or under
Speaker 1: the line. I don't know where you put the line.
Speaker 1: But for for some people it worked, and I do
Speaker 1: think that's an interesting thing to acknowledge that while for
Speaker 1: me I experienced this, uh, not to the same extent
Speaker 1: as the Scorpion King, but a kind of Scorpion King revulsion,
Speaker 1: not everybody did. Now, one thing about Tarkan is that
Speaker 1: the Tarkan c Jack character is correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: because I have not seen it myself yet. But he
Speaker 1: is interacting with human actors in this in his scenes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so, or at least he's in a film
Speaker 1: with other human actors, even if he's not sharing the
Speaker 1: exact same scene with them. So you might think, well,
Speaker 1: if you just had a movie just full of brilliant
Speaker 1: looking Tarkans, maybe it would be okay. And maybe it would.
Speaker 1: But some of the classic examples of Uncanny Valley happened
Speaker 1: to be films that are filled with nothing but c
Speaker 1: g I characters. Yeah, how about one from the same
Speaker 1: year as The mom of Your Turns two thousand one,
Speaker 1: If you go back to Oh Yes, Final Fantasy, The
Speaker 1: Spirits Within, I remember kind of liking it. I do too.
Speaker 1: It was a film that I think I kind of
Speaker 1: half watched, half worked on, like some just college coursework
Speaker 1: or something just on in the background. And and maybe
Speaker 1: that was the right level of immersion in it. But
Speaker 1: I remember digging it. But at the same time, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of dead puppet eyes in this movie.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and it's so I saw it at the time.
Speaker 1: I remember having mixed feelings about the animation, like in
Speaker 1: some senses, I remember thinking, Wow, that looks so cool.
Speaker 1: That again may have been a product of its time.
Speaker 1: We can talk about that more, how our expectations change
Speaker 1: as things go on. But also I don't know. There
Speaker 1: were multiple things wrong with that movie, one of which
Speaker 1: being that the last line of spoken dialogue in the movie,
Speaker 1: as a friend of mine pointed out at the time,
Speaker 1: was oh it's warm. Well I could I don't remember
Speaker 1: the line, so I can't speak to it how well
Speaker 1: it landed, But I can see that being a problem credits. Now,
Speaker 1: another big one, this came out just three years later, is,
Speaker 1: of course, The Polar Express. Now, when people talk about
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley these days, I'd say this is a
Speaker 1: top three mentioned. Yeah, this is one of the defining
Speaker 1: nightmares of our time now based on a wonderful children's
Speaker 1: book about the magic of Christmas time. Yeah, the book
Speaker 1: is wonderful, but it's certainly one of these examples. If
Speaker 1: you take a very brief children's book and you try
Speaker 1: and adapt it into a a feature length motion picture,
Speaker 1: that's very difficult to do. In fact, I'm really grasping
Speaker 1: for an example where anybody actually pulled it off. Like,
Speaker 1: the best adaptations of children's books that come to mind
Speaker 1: are all very short, uh, very short films generally. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of Dr Seus's adaptations from the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: not The Polar Express, which is just an exercise in
Speaker 1: psychic trauma brought on by just seemingly intentionally weaponized Uncanny Valley. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the soulless puppet people. I've never seen this movie,
Speaker 1: but I looked up clips to see what people were
Speaker 1: talking about, and oh man, they they are not kidding it.
Speaker 1: I don't know how children made it through this movie.
Speaker 1: It has these it has these creepy elves, It's got
Speaker 1: a creepy Tom Hanks as a train conductor. Nothing seems right,
Speaker 1: Everything seems like it's just about to everybody's about to
Speaker 1: start melting and screaming. Yeah. I think this is one
Speaker 1: where it was a poor idea in my opinion, and
Speaker 1: uh in the technology was not there to to rescue
Speaker 1: the idea. Now the next one we're going to discuss though.
Speaker 1: I think it was a great idea on paper, but
Speaker 1: it just didn't work out on the screen. And that's
Speaker 1: of course two thousand sevens Baywolf. Now as this Robert
Speaker 1: Zemeckis who did this, Yeah, Robert Zemeckis helmed it. And
Speaker 1: then the writing it was Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery.
Speaker 1: So some you know, some some some big names just
Speaker 1: attached and to the the ideas behind this, uh this movie,
Speaker 1: and of course based on the story of Grindel and Beowulf,
Speaker 1: which is a classic you would think, you know, hard
Speaker 1: to miss action narrative. I think the Beowolf could make
Speaker 1: a really great movie if somebody did it right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so too. I have yet to see that movie.
Speaker 1: But but but certainly has all the the potential in
Speaker 1: the world. And they had a pretty cool vocal cast
Speaker 1: as well, I think. And Angelina Jolie is in it
Speaker 1: as the monster's mother. They have ray Winstone as Bayolwolf. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he does the voice of Beowulf, and uh, and who
Speaker 1: was it that plays the monster? We were just crisp
Speaker 1: now I've seen it all back home. Not one of
Speaker 1: my favorite monster depictions of Grenville, by the way, But
Speaker 1: he's a monster. We can get past that. But everybody
Speaker 1: else in the film really has the uncanny valley that
Speaker 1: going on to to a high degree. I think I
Speaker 1: read a quote somewhere where film critic was talking about
Speaker 1: how the monsters in the movie were only slightly less
Speaker 1: frightening than the humans. Yeah, yeah, the humans. It just
Speaker 1: it just didn't land. Now at this point you're probably thinking, well,
Speaker 1: how about video games, because they're certainly when you're thinking
Speaker 1: about computer animated human beings interacting with each other, staring
Speaker 1: right into the camera, you think of video games. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and I think, and you know, here's here's the
Speaker 1: thing here. I have to say that I haven't noticed
Speaker 1: it as often these days I think a lot of
Speaker 1: game animators have found ways to get around the uncanny Valley. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get to ahead of our flow here,
Speaker 1: but I think one thing that I've noticed they sometimes
Speaker 1: do is that they don't actually go for photo realism,
Speaker 1: and they go for a kind of more real than
Speaker 1: real combination of like a comic book style type character illustration,
Speaker 1: and then these other realistic aspects that when when you
Speaker 1: look at a video game character, you would never mistake
Speaker 1: it for a photograph of a person, even even one
Speaker 1: that's got really good graphics. But much like the way
Speaker 1: dialogue is written in films, you know, you don't want
Speaker 1: to make dialogue sound like real people talk, because that
Speaker 1: would be horrible to listen to, but you do want
Speaker 1: to make it sound quote realistic. You don't want to
Speaker 1: make your characters look too realistic in animation, but you
Speaker 1: do want to make them look quote realistic. In other words,
Speaker 1: they feel real. Yeah, this reminds me of a game
Speaker 1: franchise that I haven't I don't think I've ever played
Speaker 1: more than a demo of this, but the Gears of
Speaker 1: War series. So all the people in this kind of
Speaker 1: look like like if you're gonna be critical, but you
Speaker 1: might say everyone looks kind of like they're weird guerrilla people.
Speaker 1: Like it was a like we're in an alternate world
Speaker 1: where unrealistically huge upper bodies. Yeah, as if evolution took
Speaker 1: a slightly different turn into an intelligent primates. Uh. And
Speaker 1: yet they look real. They don't look like they don't
Speaker 1: get an uncanny effect rolling off them, Like you know,
Speaker 1: you look at them, you can see pores, you can
Speaker 1: see hair follicills. They look real, but they are but
Speaker 1: that they are certainly not going for authentic human being
Speaker 1: there all right, Now, I want to put out one
Speaker 1: more example here before we move on, and it's a
Speaker 1: rare example of uncanny valley avoidance, a very specific type
Speaker 1: of uncanny valley avoidance, and that is au from a
Speaker 1: fantastic stop motion short that was produced by the National
Speaker 1: Film Board of Canada. And you can find this online
Speaker 1: if you just do a search for it. It's Madam
Speaker 1: Tutley Putly and it's a wonderful little little film, very
Speaker 1: very French feel to it. Characters on a train, weirds,
Speaker 1: frightening things occurring. Uh, definitely check it out. But the
Speaker 1: trick to it there, these are stop motion animated characters,
Speaker 1: and their eyes just feel so alive. They stare right
Speaker 1: into you, and you don't you don't question for a
Speaker 1: second that these are that these are people. And the
Speaker 1: trick that they employed is that they used real human eyes,
Speaker 1: not in a you know, depraved, evil puppet master kind
Speaker 1: of way, either. They videotape the eyes of human actors
Speaker 1: and then blended the footage with that of the puppets.
Speaker 1: That sounds like an incredible gambit, because that sounds like
Speaker 1: that could have produced some of the worst Uncanny Valley
Speaker 1: feelings ever if it went wrong. Yeah, and and I
Speaker 1: don't know, there may be some people who watch this
Speaker 1: short and and have the opposite effect and and think
Speaker 1: that it's super creepy. I found it to be like this,
Speaker 1: this interesting example of circumventing the Uncanny Valley. But I'll
Speaker 1: leave it for you guys to decide. I'll include a
Speaker 1: link to this one as well as some of the
Speaker 1: other sources we're talking about on the landing page for
Speaker 1: this episode. It's stuff to blow your mind dot com.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we are going to take a quick
Speaker 1: break and when we come back will get into the
Speaker 1: origin of the scientific idea of the Uncanny Valley and
Speaker 1: its history and research. All right, we're back. So the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley. Where does this even come from? Right? So
Speaker 1: we've already been talking about it because most people have
Speaker 1: heard of this, they're somewhat familiar with it. I was
Speaker 1: talking to Rachel about it though. She was saying, you know,
Speaker 1: at least to her, it had this connotation of just
Speaker 1: generally synthetically generated images being creepy in one way or another.
Speaker 1: So maybe we should get into the specifics of the
Speaker 1: origin of the idea. So let's go back to the
Speaker 1: year nineteen seventy. Everything's great, Wait is it? I don't know,
Speaker 1: but but everybody, everybody's looking forward to the future in
Speaker 1: terms of creating humanoid robots. What are we going to
Speaker 1: be able to do well? The Japanese roboticist massa Hiro
Speaker 1: Mori of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He wrote a
Speaker 1: paper that was published in this Japanese journal Energy that
Speaker 1: coined the term uncanny Valley to describe a problem that
Speaker 1: he was predicting with increasingly humanoid robots. And this was
Speaker 1: based on just some observations he'd had of of different events.
Speaker 1: So you might say incidents in the progress of designing
Speaker 1: humanoid robots, such as consumer electronics shows in Japan and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So what he predicted was that as
Speaker 1: you had a humanoid robot, robot that looks like a
Speaker 1: human and its likeness to a human increased, our attitude
Speaker 1: towards them would improve. Our affinity would go up as
Speaker 1: they became more human, until they reached a certain tipping
Speaker 1: point of similarity to humans, where suddenly our affinity, our
Speaker 1: friendly attitude, almost immediately shifts and plunges down into strong revulsion.
Speaker 1: Being human is likable, being sort of human is likable,
Speaker 1: but being almost human is horrible and repulsive. And then
Speaker 1: of course at the final end, uh you you would
Speaker 1: have a real human. So you can think of the
Speaker 1: uncanny valley as a phase in a graph, an X
Speaker 1: Y graph, and along the horizontal axis on the bottom,
Speaker 1: you've got the degree of similarity to a human, and
Speaker 1: then on the vertical axis you've got the degree of
Speaker 1: our affinity for the object. And more hypothesized, this graph
Speaker 1: would have these two peaks. You'd start with zero on
Speaker 1: both axes, because a thing that has no human like
Speaker 1: traits basically gets no human affinity response one way or another.
Speaker 1: And we just don't you know, how much do you
Speaker 1: really like an industrial conveyor belt. You're just sort of
Speaker 1: neutral on it. But as you increase the humanity, you
Speaker 1: give a robot arms or something that looks like a face, eyes, limbs,
Speaker 1: you climb this gentle, gradual slope to the first peak
Speaker 1: and affinity. Um, you know, and he didn't name the peak,
Speaker 1: but I think we should name the peak. I think
Speaker 1: this first peak should be called something like the cuteness peak.
Speaker 1: That's not exactly right because it's not exactly cuteness, but
Speaker 1: it's recognizing something kind of human about what you're looking at. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, we don't have to describe cute to everyone here,
Speaker 1: but certainly this is hello kitty territory, this is the
Speaker 1: this is the domain of large eyed It's vaguely infant
Speaker 1: or kitten like creatures that would never be mistaken for
Speaker 1: human or real, but they resonate with us for a
Speaker 1: number of reasons. We could do a whole podcast infect
Speaker 1: we have an old podcast episode about the science of cute.
Speaker 1: Why that connects with us? Yeah, so they would include
Speaker 1: that would include all kinds of robots that just kind
Speaker 1: of have general, very basic faces that don't try to
Speaker 1: have human skin or anything like that. That just might
Speaker 1: have like kind of a mouth and some cartoonish eyes. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: there you go. That the c three po boldly on
Speaker 1: the cuteness. But at a certain point after this first speak,
Speaker 1: this graph drops off steeply. So you keep going along
Speaker 1: the x axis, but then the y axis drops off,
Speaker 1: not just down to zero, but far below zero, into
Speaker 1: the negative affinity range. And this part of the graph
Speaker 1: is the uncanny valley. As the similarity to a real
Speaker 1: human continues to increase near a dent. In other words,
Speaker 1: as it becomes indistinguishable from a real human, our affinity
Speaker 1: sharply shoots back up the second peak toward reality. So
Speaker 1: I'd call this second peak the reality peak. It's when
Speaker 1: you become, for all intents and purposes, a real human being. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would also say that if if robots were candy,
Speaker 1: the bottom of the uncanny valley would be banana flavored
Speaker 1: candy like that for me has always been a flavor
Speaker 1: where it's like clearly like not only like runts that
Speaker 1: have the bananas. I think, so like like great candy,
Speaker 1: like grape candy doesn't really taste like grapes, but it's
Speaker 1: it's far enough from the Uncanny Valley of candy that
Speaker 1: you're you're okay, whoa, You're right, banana candy actually does
Speaker 1: taste like bananas in a way that makes it not
Speaker 1: really good. Yeah, Like I've candy fans, I don't eat
Speaker 1: that much candy anymore. So maybe the technology has advanced,
Speaker 1: but uh, my memory of the banana candy is is
Speaker 1: that of an uncanny experience. Now, one thing we should
Speaker 1: note is that so this original paper was published in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy twelve. English translation was published in uh the
Speaker 1: I Triple A Robotics and Automation magazine. And that's what
Speaker 1: I was using is my reference, that English translation from
Speaker 1: uh and so it has some graphs here. It has
Speaker 1: Morey's original graphs or interpretations of them, and we can
Speaker 1: get into a little more detail on the nuances of
Speaker 1: Morey's theory. But one thing I did read was that
Speaker 1: many years later, somebody contacted more and he and they
Speaker 1: were talking to him about this idea he had of
Speaker 1: the uncanny Valley, and they were like, well, does does
Speaker 1: anything lie beyond the peak of reality? And he said, hey,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, actually there is such a thing. And he
Speaker 1: said you know, beyond the real human, you'd have sort
Speaker 1: of like artistic ideals, like the realm of forms even right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So well, I think he used an example of like
Speaker 1: a statue of Buddha, you know, a beautiful, perfect statue
Speaker 1: of Buddha. It's almost like it we have greater affinity
Speaker 1: for it than we have for a realistic human because
Speaker 1: we've been, well, to a large point, we've been conditioned
Speaker 1: to right. Yeah, that that kind of gets into this,
Speaker 1: this idea of conditioned familiarity that we not only have
Speaker 1: with my religious icons, but also with pop culture icons,
Speaker 1: so not only the Buddha, but also Robbie the robot,
Speaker 1: or or even the Terminator or well, yeah, that does
Speaker 1: make me think that in some ways, if if aesthetic
Speaker 1: ideals and things that were familiar with through our culture
Speaker 1: might be even beyond humans. I mean, again, this is
Speaker 1: not like rigorous research, This is just what more he says,
Speaker 1: he thinks, who predicts, Uh, could could there be like
Speaker 1: a robot that we really love that's actually better than
Speaker 1: a than a normal human? Well, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: study that came out last year, I believe from Penn
Speaker 1: State University that was kind of interesting alone. These lines.
Speaker 1: So the researchers survey three seventy nine adults ages ages
Speaker 1: sixty to eighty six, and they asked them for specific
Speaker 1: memories of robot films they'd seen in their general attitudes
Speaker 1: towards robots and and the you know, with the age here,
Speaker 1: as you might imagine, they're really looking at at potential
Speaker 1: care robots, like the idea of like what kind of
Speaker 1: robots should help you use the bathroom? Do you want
Speaker 1: something that looks like kind of like a person, or
Speaker 1: do you want something that looks like a forklift with
Speaker 1: a forklift mated with an easy chair. But if you
Speaker 1: look at the ages used here and twenty sixteen, when
Speaker 1: the study took place, you can say that these people
Speaker 1: grew up with science fiction. Oh yeah, I mean they
Speaker 1: might not have personally consumed a lot of it, but
Speaker 1: it's in the culture, right, Yeah. They they definitely had
Speaker 1: access to it. And the researchers found that individuals who
Speaker 1: could recall more cinematic robot portrayals were increasingly likely to
Speaker 1: hold positive attitudes towards robots in general. So it didn't
Speaker 1: matter if they remembered murderous killbots or well meaning hell probots. Uh,
Speaker 1: they need the mere memory of multiple robotic portrayals correlated
Speaker 1: to pro robot vibes, so to study findings. They also
Speaker 1: backed up the importance of human looking human asque robots
Speaker 1: to invoke a sympathetic user response. But the researcher stress
Speaker 1: that robot designers might want to incorporate robotic features that
Speaker 1: older adults will remember from their cinematic past. So it's
Speaker 1: saying that, like, don't just try to make it like
Speaker 1: a human. Try to make it like the robots we
Speaker 1: have known and loved. Yeah, like make it fun. You know,
Speaker 1: if I'm if I need a robot to help me
Speaker 1: go to the bathroom, may make it. Make make them
Speaker 1: the robots from Silent Running, you know, Huie, Dowie and
Speaker 1: Louie a little little guys. Then at least I can
Speaker 1: engage my nostalgia a little bit totally. So I want
Speaker 1: to look at a few more nuances from Maury's original
Speaker 1: paper in nineteen seventy. So one thing I do think
Speaker 1: it's very interesting and I want to come back to
Speaker 1: as we explore this topic more. More hypothesizes in the
Speaker 1: original paper that our perception of an un handy valley
Speaker 1: might depend on the context in which we're we're viewing
Speaker 1: the being. And the example he gives here is he's
Speaker 1: talking about buon Rocko puppets, and so he says, quote,
Speaker 1: I don't think that on close inspection of bun Rocku
Speaker 1: puppet appears similar to a human being. But when we
Speaker 1: enjoy a puppet show in the theater, were seated at
Speaker 1: a certain distance from the stage, the puppets absolute size
Speaker 1: is ignored. Its total appearance, including hand and eye movements,
Speaker 1: is close to that of a human being. So, given
Speaker 1: our tendency as an audience to become absorbed in this
Speaker 1: form of art, we might feel a high level of
Speaker 1: affinity for the puppet. I think that's interesting. So it's
Speaker 1: it's not just the object, but it's also the context
Speaker 1: in which we experience the object. You might have very
Speaker 1: different feelings about a bun Rocku puppet lying on the
Speaker 1: floor versus one that you go to see in the
Speaker 1: context of staging a play. Yeah. I think that the
Speaker 1: puppet argument is something to keep in mind throughout considerations
Speaker 1: of the Uncanny Valley because there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people that there are a lot of people who have
Speaker 1: kind of um an irrational version to puppets in general,
Speaker 1: and certainly if you take just a still puppet and
Speaker 1: you hold it up, there are various puppets that one
Speaker 1: might find a little bit uncanny or creepy, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: in the process of performing with a talented performer is
Speaker 1: going to bring that to life. Like that's the art form.
Speaker 1: And and there's so many different varieties of puppetry. Certainly
Speaker 1: they're they're too broad categories are it's situations where the
Speaker 1: puppeteer is visible and puppet situation where puppeteer is not.
Speaker 1: You know, so you have your basic the Muppets situation
Speaker 1: where you don't see the puppeteers, but there are plenty
Speaker 1: of art forms of puppetry performance styles in which the
Speaker 1: puppeteer is very visible, either completely or just their face.
Speaker 1: You see their eyes, you see that there's a person
Speaker 1: involved here, and uh, and there's not this this mystery
Speaker 1: or this sense of deception, right, yeah, I think conceptual
Speaker 1: clues like that are very important. Also is when you
Speaker 1: consider the the the idea of going to a puppet theater,
Speaker 1: it also includes a certain attitude charging effect in the audience,
Speaker 1: Like an an audience member goes to a puppet theater
Speaker 1: prepared to suspend their disbelief, like you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: Like you put yourself in an intentional state of open
Speaker 1: mindedness about what you're viewing, and you give yourself an
Speaker 1: interpretive framework through which to Like if you were not
Speaker 1: prepared to watch a puppet theater story and suddenly a
Speaker 1: puppet was just moving around, that might be a lot creepier.
Speaker 1: So part of the Uncanny Valley effect is probably also
Speaker 1: in the viewer themselves and in the so the context
Speaker 1: is not just where you are, what's going on with
Speaker 1: what you're looking at, but what you're expecting to see. Now.
Speaker 1: One more thing that Morey points out is he thinks
Speaker 1: that they're going to be very different rules governing the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley for still objects versus moving objects. And essentially
Speaker 1: his hypothesis is that movement is going to amplify both
Speaker 1: the peaks and the valleys of the graph. So if
Speaker 1: you imagine the graph we said earlier, gentle slope up
Speaker 1: to first peak, you know, kind of cute whatever has
Speaker 1: some human characteristics, then a dip down into too close
Speaker 1: to human but not there, and then a final rise
Speaker 1: up to actually human. He he would say if it's moving,
Speaker 1: the peaks are going to be higher and the valleys
Speaker 1: are going to be lower. Okay, so a thing that
Speaker 1: is moving gets greater affinity if it's good if it's
Speaker 1: at one of these two peaks, but it's even more
Speaker 1: revolting and unpleasant if it's at the valley. Uh So
Speaker 1: this this makes me think of Samara in The Ring,
Speaker 1: those scenes where Samara is emerging from the TV or
Speaker 1: the well, her movement is is jerky and and I
Speaker 1: understand that they created that effect by having the actor
Speaker 1: or actress walk backwards and then reversing the footage. So
Speaker 1: you have this, you have this this movement that is
Speaker 1: you know, natural, but being reversed it it feels very
Speaker 1: unnatural and and it's hard to really pinpoint what's not
Speaker 1: working for you about it. Right. So More in the
Speaker 1: end concludes he gives this recommendation based on his hypothesis.
Speaker 1: He says, don't go for realism, right, It's gonna be
Speaker 1: so hard if you're designing a humanoid robot. Now, a
Speaker 1: lot of what we're we're talking about in these episodes
Speaker 1: is animation. He's talking primarily about humanoid robots, but typically
Speaker 1: these uh two fields get somewhat conflated in discussion of
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley, because in both cases you're trying to
Speaker 1: create something that looks pleasingly human. Um. He wrote, it's
Speaker 1: gonna be so hard to get out of the valley
Speaker 1: up the second peak, that that's the reality peak is
Speaker 1: so steep. Instead, roboticists should not try, and instead they
Speaker 1: should aim for the very tip of the first peak.
Speaker 1: Stick on the cuteness peak because we know we can
Speaker 1: get there. Think think Wally or other cute humanoid robots.
Speaker 1: The first peak is not really that hard to attain.
Speaker 1: People respond well to it, So why do you need
Speaker 1: to try to go past it? Um? You know. As
Speaker 1: for animated humans, I think a good analogy might be here.
Speaker 1: Here's one Pixars The Incredibles versus Final Fantasy The Spirits,
Speaker 1: within which we already mentioned. The former they don't look
Speaker 1: like real humans at all, right, they're cute, cartoonish, non
Speaker 1: realistic humans, but they're quite pleasant. The latter goes for
Speaker 1: and fails at photo realism and creates these characters that
Speaker 1: are stiff and unsettling. In other words, he says, don't
Speaker 1: try to climb out of the valley. Just don't go
Speaker 1: into the valley to begin with. Yeah, this this really
Speaker 1: brings to mind just the idea of like filmmakers and
Speaker 1: creators standing on the the the edge of this physical
Speaker 1: valley and there's a local guide. They're saying, don't do it.
Speaker 1: Don't do it, the value will consume you. And they're like, no,
Speaker 1: we're Lucasfilm. We can do it. Yeah, we got all
Speaker 1: this high text gear. There's no way that anything's gonna
Speaker 1: take us down there. And then they go down there
Speaker 1: and it's just Jurassic Parker congo with They just get
Speaker 1: torn apart. You know, I do. I do think the
Speaker 1: dinosaurs in Jurassic Park come out of the uncanny valley
Speaker 1: for dinosaurs. They do. Yeah, And that introduces an interesting
Speaker 1: wrinkle in that, like Maury is talking about human wide qualities,
Speaker 1: it would probably be a related but different thing to
Speaker 1: just say animal reality versus specifically human reality. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I mean when for non human creatures, certainly we've been
Speaker 1: able to nail that. For ages to stop motion creatures,
Speaker 1: often even if their movements are kind of herky jerky,
Speaker 1: they feel great. Um that heard of stop motion robots
Speaker 1: in older films, So that I've never had a problem
Speaker 1: buying into them, and yeah, you're look into the eye
Speaker 1: of the track or the t rex or the velociraptor
Speaker 1: and you never doubt for a second. Yeah. But so
Speaker 1: one thing I think we should point out is that
Speaker 1: as prescient as Mori was of what would become this
Speaker 1: widely recognized pop culture phenomenon his paper, it's not it's
Speaker 1: not research, really, it's just sort of observation and interesting speculation.
Speaker 1: So what we should shift now to do, I think,
Speaker 1: is talk about whether there's really any evidence that the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley number one exists at all? Is it really
Speaker 1: a thing number two? Is it a is it a
Speaker 1: unified phenomenon, or is it there there's some separate things
Speaker 1: getting pulled into the net together here. And then finally
Speaker 1: maybe we should look at if it's real, what causes it?
Speaker 1: Why do human brains tend to react this way? So
Speaker 1: maybe we should take a quick break, and then when
Speaker 1: we come back we will get into more recent research. Thank. Okay,
Speaker 1: So there's there's really no denying that there is some
Speaker 1: kind of creepy humanoid synthetic figure effect. Right. We we've
Speaker 1: all seen these c g I movies, We've all seen
Speaker 1: these creepy robots and had that feeling of don't like it.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't necessarily mean that the uncanny Valley, as
Speaker 1: described by Mori or as popularly conceived in culture, is
Speaker 1: in fact a correct description of what's happening there. Right
Speaker 1: just because it it feels truthy, just because it lines
Speaker 1: up with to a certain degree with how we feel
Speaker 1: about the world, doesn't mean that it is. You know,
Speaker 1: that it is an actual effect that's taking place, and
Speaker 1: or that it's even a fixed effect, etcetera. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of factors to contemplate here, Like for my
Speaker 1: own part, I've always found it interesting and I definitely
Speaker 1: think there's something to it. However, you line it up
Speaker 1: with similar cases in life, such as say, individuals that
Speaker 1: you may encounter who have some degree of facial disfigurement,
Speaker 1: and it might be extremely mild. It might be it
Speaker 1: might be nothing more than a uh in then you
Speaker 1: know a lazy eye, or or you know some sort
Speaker 1: of cleft lip or cleft palate to scenario it, or
Speaker 1: it just might be like their faces maybe not all
Speaker 1: that symmetrical, and you know nobody whose face is perfectly symmetrical.
Speaker 1: But with all of these individual rules, you interact with them,
Speaker 1: you get to know them maybe, and whatever kind of
Speaker 1: like initial um reaction is present, be it just kind
Speaker 1: of a huh or that goes away, and you can
Speaker 1: unless you're a total jerk, unless you're a total jerk,
Speaker 1: or you're gonna be able to relate to that person.
Speaker 1: You're gonna be able to communicate with that person, and
Speaker 1: you're not going to be thrown for a curve every
Speaker 1: time they make eye contact with you. Yeah, I would
Speaker 1: agree with that. So there is certainly, like in Maury's
Speaker 1: original formulation, he he would, I think, put different kinds
Speaker 1: of um physical abnormality somewhere on the ascending slope, on
Speaker 1: the on the on the uncanny valley slope. So you
Speaker 1: have a normal, healthy human up at the peak, I
Speaker 1: guess somewhere below the artistic ideal of the great Buddhist
Speaker 1: statue or something. But you'd have normal, healthy human. Then
Speaker 1: somewhere below them would be people who have who look
Speaker 1: like there is something wrong with them in terms of
Speaker 1: having uh, you know, perfect health and symmetricality. I mean
Speaker 1: so because just an ill person, you encounter someone who
Speaker 1: is clearly a little bit sick or a little bit
Speaker 1: hungover or whatever. You can tell and it it causes
Speaker 1: a light to go off in your head. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and yet we can quite easily adapt to people
Speaker 1: like you know, you see somebody like that, it is
Speaker 1: you just know, it is not proper to react to
Speaker 1: somebody with revulsion. Oh yeah, like right now in Atlanta
Speaker 1: as we're recording, this pollen is everywhere. So there are
Speaker 1: several people in my life. I'm not really affected by
Speaker 1: the pollen so much, but it totally debilitates some of
Speaker 1: my coworkers, some of my friends and red face puffy eyes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and sometimes they're like walked out on allergy medication
Speaker 1: to boot and you just get you just you know,
Speaker 1: you accept it. You realize, oh, well, you know, my
Speaker 1: my friend here is going to be kind of a
Speaker 1: pollen zombie for a couple of weeks. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean we can't hang out. It doesn't mean we can't
Speaker 1: work on this or that. Yeah. So definitely, The Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley has plenty of critics, and plenty I think a
Speaker 1: very fair criticisms leveled at it. I just want to
Speaker 1: go back to one popular article I came across a
Speaker 1: two thousand ten article in Popular Mechanics by Eric Softge,
Speaker 1: where he sort of points out that at the time,
Speaker 1: people were, as I think they are still now treating
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley as a proven fact, but in fact,
Speaker 1: at the time, he says, you know, there's really almost
Speaker 1: no convincing evidence that such a thing even exists, and
Speaker 1: he speaks to an expert named Carl McDorman, director of
Speaker 1: the Android Science Center at Indiana University, and McDorman, who
Speaker 1: has conducted research on the valley, offered his opinion in
Speaker 1: the article, saying quote, it turns out that there may
Speaker 1: be more than one Uncanny Valley. It's not the overall
Speaker 1: degree of human likeness that makes a robot or animated
Speaker 1: character uncanny. It's more a matter of mismatch. If you
Speaker 1: have an extremely realistic skin texture, but at the same
Speaker 1: time cartoonish eyes or realistic eyes and an unrealistic skin texture,
Speaker 1: that's very uncanny, uh and the art. So that's an
Speaker 1: idea about the perceptual mismatch that I do want to
Speaker 1: revisit later in this episode. But the article also speaks
Speaker 1: to a guy named David Hanson who's a roboticist who
Speaker 1: specifically specializes in creating very realistic humanoid robots. I think
Speaker 1: he did that that Einstein head thing. Oh yeah, nothing. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: Hansen claims that even if people find overly realistic robots
Speaker 1: creepy at first, they get used to them within minutes.
Speaker 1: This is sort of what you were just talking about.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, you become acclimated even to something
Speaker 1: that you might uh at some kind of base level,
Speaker 1: have a negative reaction to. Yeah. I keep thinking of
Speaker 1: aving in isolation in this because it's the game I'm
Speaker 1: currently playing, and uh, and I feel like that the
Speaker 1: c g I characters are are are pretty well done
Speaker 1: in there. I haven't felt that the tinge of of
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley so washing over me. Some of the voice
Speaker 1: actings a little weak. But but but speaking of the voice,
Speaker 1: like the that the androids you encounter though with the
Speaker 1: sexs and uh androids that key. Yeah, and when I
Speaker 1: first on Canny Valley, well yeah, but when I first
Speaker 1: encountered them, yeah, they had the uncanny intentionally kind of
Speaker 1: creepy appearance and the very creepy robot voice. But yet
Speaker 1: when they were not actively attacking me, I kind of was.
Speaker 1: I was kind of cool with it. It wasn't until
Speaker 1: heded becoming violent. That that that the mere sound of
Speaker 1: their voice or the appearance of one UH down the
Speaker 1: you know, in the distance down the hallway, would would
Speaker 1: cause my nerves to react. I mean, those things are
Speaker 1: funny there, h They're a good part of that game.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so in this UH article, the author also
Speaker 1: cites some other unnamed robot roboticists, as well as his
Speaker 1: own experience when he's talking about meeting robots that he
Speaker 1: had previously seen on video, and one thing he says is,
Speaker 1: you know, an Uncanny Valley effect that was present when
Speaker 1: I saw a video of this robot went away when
Speaker 1: I saw it in person. I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: generally true of people, he claims it's true. But even
Speaker 1: if this is truly the case for robots, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how it would apply to animations. Probably wouldn't apply
Speaker 1: to animations. UM. But I think that there are some
Speaker 1: good threads to start tugging at here, because it's probably
Speaker 1: the case that there are more dimensions to the Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley than more he imagined in nineteen seventy, meaning more
Speaker 1: than just that X axis of um closeness to realistic
Speaker 1: human appearance versus distance from realistic human appearance. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean just that what makes a person human, what makes
Speaker 1: a lightness human. There's arguably a whole chorus of things
Speaker 1: going on there. Yeah, so it would make sense that
Speaker 1: that that chorus would play into the Uncanny Valley. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I do think that there are multiple other dimensions
Speaker 1: to be explored. But I also don't think that means
Speaker 1: we can conclude that there's nothing to the Uncanny Valley.
Speaker 1: And in the past decade there's actually been an explosion
Speaker 1: of research on the Uncanny Valley. So I think we
Speaker 1: should look at a few interesting studies on the effect.
Speaker 1: All right, well, uh, first one here that I came
Speaker 1: across was a two thousand nine Princeton University study and
Speaker 1: they looked into the effects of uncanny avowe of the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley on macaque monkeys, so so non human subjects. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because that that makes sense, right if you if you
Speaker 1: want to see if this is an evolved response, let's
Speaker 1: look beyond the complications of human intelligence and human culture
Speaker 1: and looked something closely related to us. Is it biological
Speaker 1: rather than say cultural? Right, And so they showed a
Speaker 1: selection of the primates close to real quote unquote computer
Speaker 1: visuals of macaques to see if they responded with coups
Speaker 1: and lip smacking as they do with their fellow monkeys. Uh.
Speaker 1: And these these close to real computer visuals were essentially
Speaker 1: lawnmower man monkeys. If you see they kind of asking
Speaker 1: if I've seen lawnmower man. You know I've seen lawn man. Yes,
Speaker 1: so yeah, think a lot more man. Uh and you
Speaker 1: kind of have an idea that that level of compute animation,
Speaker 1: and the monkeys did not want any part of it,
Speaker 1: and they averted their eyes, they acted frightened when confronted
Speaker 1: with lawnmower man monkey. So it's not much, i admit,
Speaker 1: but it's a little experimental evidence for the argument that
Speaker 1: uncanny valley is an evolutionary response. Right, so if you
Speaker 1: can observe it in monkeys, there's probably some element of
Speaker 1: it that that is biological in the brain. It's instinctual
Speaker 1: and not just something we've all learned to say about
Speaker 1: weirdly looking animated characters and robots. And that would be
Speaker 1: maybe a weak piece of evidence, but still a piece
Speaker 1: of evidence you could put in the column of saying
Speaker 1: there is something there. The valley does to some extent
Speaker 1: exist now the next study that I ran across. This
Speaker 1: comes back, this to one of the graphics that you
Speaker 1: pulled out of the believe the original uh study correct? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the original Morey's original graphs. So in this graph and
Speaker 1: we talked about diving down into the valley and then
Speaker 1: steadily try to claw yourself out on the other side,
Speaker 1: very very steep ascent. Yeah, so you hit bottom and
Speaker 1: that's where you have a zombie and as you begin
Speaker 1: to scale out of the uncanny valley, he has um uh,
Speaker 1: myoelectric hand and prosthetic hand down there. As you climb
Speaker 1: back up, eventually hitting ordinary doll and and puppets and
Speaker 1: ill person and maybe hitting healthy person at the very top. Again.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting you have prosthetic hand down there, because
Speaker 1: this next study looks at prosthetic and robotic and human hands. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is in the original study. More He talks about
Speaker 1: the variable creepiness of prosthetic hands. And I found I
Speaker 1: found this interesting because I don't know about you, but
Speaker 1: but growing up I felt like crazy robot hands. Especially
Speaker 1: we're everywhere like every G. I. Joe show or Heman
Speaker 1: type franchise, there's always somebody it could be a villain,
Speaker 1: it could be a hero. But there were crazy robot
Speaker 1: hands galore, UH, and I always found them cool, and
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of us probably even fetishize
Speaker 1: them to a certain point, Like we we didn't understand
Speaker 1: what it would necessarily be like to lose and lose
Speaker 1: a hand and the shortfall and the ability of technology
Speaker 1: at the time and even today to replace that missing limb.
Speaker 1: But we thought, well, that looks cool. Superpowered robot hands
Speaker 1: signed me up, right. But back to the study two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen University of Manchester study, and they looked at
Speaker 1: prosthetic hands. UH. They used of forty three right handed participants,
Speaker 1: thirty six female and seven male, and they were all
Speaker 1: looking at photos, and the photos were divided into three categories.
Speaker 1: Human hands, robotic hands like, no question about it, that's
Speaker 1: a robot hand I'm looking at like straight up terminator
Speaker 1: exoskeleton or or or even less human, and then prosthetic hands.
Speaker 1: The results, I have to say, reading through some some
Speaker 1: of the writing about this UH and the original press release,
Speaker 1: the results were kind of confusing sounding. They the subjects
Speaker 1: here preferred human hands and robot hands, but but rated
Speaker 1: and certainly rated prosthetic hands is more uncanny, but prosthetics
Speaker 1: that looked more human were less eerie. Okay, So so
Speaker 1: something that's clearly a robot that's not too creepy. Something's
Speaker 1: clearly a human that's not too creepy. If something is
Speaker 1: a robot trying to be human, that might be more creepy,
Speaker 1: but as it gets better at being human, it's less creepy,
Speaker 1: I think. So, I think that's my take. I mean,
Speaker 1: it also makes me wonder if if the hand alone
Speaker 1: is an is like a subset of the uncanny valet,
Speaker 1: because certainly if you're if you're just working with a
Speaker 1: hand and trying to replicate the movements, the look, the
Speaker 1: feel of a human limb for an observer, not we're
Speaker 1: not going to even get into the the you know,
Speaker 1: the problems of creating something that the user can experience
Speaker 1: as a lifelike limb. But if you're just looking at it,
Speaker 1: if you don't have to worry about its eye contact,
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about micro expressions. Uh, it
Speaker 1: seems like it would be an easier peak to surmount. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the if that is in fact the correct interpretation,
Speaker 1: that would seem to undercut the steepness in Maury's original
Speaker 1: graph right on the on the final peak. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what I'm wondering. Because the hand had
Speaker 1: taken in isolation, is thinking would be easier to replicate. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh and Uncanny Valley. Let's face it, when we talk
Speaker 1: about it, most of the time we're talking about faces.
Speaker 1: Right now, Speaking of faces, there's another study. UM. This
Speaker 1: is a two thousand and eleven University of California, San
Speaker 1: Diego study. UM. This was published in the Social Cognitive
Speaker 1: and Effective Neuroscience, and they did exactly what you'd expect
Speaker 1: researchers to do when confronted with the Uncanny Valley. Grab
Speaker 1: the f m r I and see what our brains
Speaker 1: are doing when we're looking at all these images. So
Speaker 1: all these fMRI I studies, all right, well, what what
Speaker 1: did they find? All right, I'll roll through the basics
Speaker 1: of the study here? So twenty subjects, not a not
Speaker 1: a huge study here, aged thirty six. And here were
Speaker 1: some of the the caveats they had in selecting these individuals.
Speaker 1: No experience working with robots, no time spent in Japan,
Speaker 1: no friends or family from Japan because they wanted to
Speaker 1: avoid uh any you know, potential cultural exposure that would
Speaker 1: have made them, would make them more accepting of androids. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the idea is that maybe in Japan people just
Speaker 1: experience humanoid robots way too much already there too, they're
Speaker 1: acclimatized to them. Yeah, that that's the the argument they made,
Speaker 1: and laying out the study, let's let's not even go there,
Speaker 1: let's just deal with people who have less exposure to robots.
Speaker 1: And they were shown twelve videos of a humanoid robot
Speaker 1: named repley Q two. Oh man, I'm looking it up
Speaker 1: right now. It's it's it's rough, but well, they watched
Speaker 1: video twelve videos of this robot doing various things, and
Speaker 1: they were shown videos of humans doing the same things.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the robots movements and mannerisms were patterned
Speaker 1: directly after the humans. So you had a you had
Speaker 1: a human version of the actions, you had an android
Speaker 1: version of the actions, uh, you know, a lifelike robot,
Speaker 1: and then you had a a stripped down version of
Speaker 1: the androids. So basically the android with all its skin
Speaker 1: ripped off, so it looks more like a robot, clearly
Speaker 1: a robot, and it's doing the same motions as well.
Speaker 1: So this broke it all down to a human with
Speaker 1: biological appearance in movement, a robot with mechanical appearance and
Speaker 1: mechanical motion, and a human seeming agent with the exact
Speaker 1: same mechanical movements as the robot. Then in came the
Speaker 1: f M R I scans. So the main brain area
Speaker 1: of note here, the the area that that that that
Speaker 1: lit up where we saw the most activity, the parietal
Speaker 1: cortex on both sides of the brain, specifically in the
Speaker 1: areas that connect the part of the brain's visual cortex
Speaker 1: that process bodily movements with the section of the motor
Speaker 1: cortex thought to contain mirror neurons. So those would be
Speaker 1: like the the empathy parts of the brain where you know,
Speaker 1: we we see something going on in some other creature
Speaker 1: like us, and we empathize with it. Exactly. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: when viewing the human looking android, the brain lit up
Speaker 1: at the recognition of a human form, but registered essentially
Speaker 1: a computing error over the movement. Something didn't match up.
Speaker 1: Uh so it's it's not. According to this study, it
Speaker 1: would seem that it's not the biological movement or the
Speaker 1: biological appearance, it's the congruents or lack of congruents between
Speaker 1: the two. You look alive but you're dead, you look
Speaker 1: dead but you move you or you speak as if
Speaker 1: you're alive. Uh. So the researchers noted that this is
Speaker 1: something that could be retuned through exposure, but it could
Speaker 1: be at the heart of what's going on with the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley. Interesting. Well, I think we should look at
Speaker 1: one more study, uh, potentially providing recent support for the
Speaker 1: existence of the Uncanny Valley, and then maybe after that
Speaker 1: we should break and then come back next time to
Speaker 1: get into the causes, what what would be causing this
Speaker 1: effect and uh and future. So I want to look
Speaker 1: at a study that came out in two six in
Speaker 1: the journal Cognition by Mather and Rifling called Navigating a
Speaker 1: Social World with Robot Partners. A Quantitative cartography of the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley. Cute invocation of map making there because it
Speaker 1: does kind of make sense. I like the idea of
Speaker 1: mapping the valley because that indicates that it may expand
Speaker 1: beyond just the one dimensional dip and is in fact
Speaker 1: more of a topographical space, you know, like we can
Speaker 1: extend into three dimensions. But anyway, So to get into
Speaker 1: the study, the author's note that while the Uncanny Valley
Speaker 1: has very strong intuitive support, people tend to take it
Speaker 1: as fact, experimental evidence for it has been limited and inconsistent.
Speaker 1: As as we mentioned earlier, some studies seem to find
Speaker 1: evidence for the valley, others don't you know, they say this,
Speaker 1: This isn't necessarily a thing. So there are multiple experiments here. First,
Speaker 1: they did a thing that I think was pretty smart.
Speaker 1: If they were trying to chart a linear progression of
Speaker 1: the up and down peaks and valleys, they tried to
Speaker 1: generate an objectively determined gradient of more and less human
Speaker 1: looking robots. So what a lot of these studies do
Speaker 1: is maybe along the macaques study ideas, they show you
Speaker 1: a lawnmower man, they show you a real person, they
Speaker 1: show you a robot, uh, and they ask you to
Speaker 1: characterize you know, how do you feel about these? What
Speaker 1: they did here is that they gathered a very large
Speaker 1: sample or relatively large sample of eighty images quote from
Speaker 1: the wild meaning from the Internet. So these wild type
Speaker 1: robots samples, and they had a bunch of inclusion and
Speaker 1: exclusion criteria. I don't want to get into all of them,
Speaker 1: but they tried to limit it to where it would
Speaker 1: it would kind of throw out all these variables they
Speaker 1: could complicate things like they tried to keep just certain
Speaker 1: types of pictures of faces of real robots that are
Speaker 1: built and uh and they had some exclusion criteria like
Speaker 1: it couldn't be a well known character of a famous person.
Speaker 1: Uh um, it couldn't have objects overlapping the face, It
Speaker 1: couldn't be a toy, it had to be a real
Speaker 1: humanoid robot. And then they had subjects rate these images
Speaker 1: on what they call the mechano Humanoid scale, basically to
Speaker 1: come up with an objectively derived score for each image
Speaker 1: by using this this empirical research, by going to a
Speaker 1: bunch of people and saying, hey, how mechanical is this?
Speaker 1: How human is this? And then after they had a
Speaker 1: rating for each of these eight images, and Robert have
Speaker 1: included an image, uh, I think down here to show you,
Speaker 1: like what all these robots where you can kind of see.
Speaker 1: It starts with things that look not human at all,
Speaker 1: just like a lump of wires and junk, and then
Speaker 1: it proceeds up to something that looks like a picture
Speaker 1: of a guy. Yes, yeah, very much. Though you start
Speaker 1: off with very kind of wallyesque heads. Then you move
Speaker 1: in through like like skinless gremlins, and then through the
Speaker 1: sort of the the expected hierarchy of umanoid robots. Okay,
Speaker 1: so they've got this thing, and then they rate all
Speaker 1: these images and sort them into an ascending scale of humanness.
Speaker 1: And then they took ratings in multiple different ways of
Speaker 1: likability and trustworthiness. Now, in likability, they claimed to find
Speaker 1: a robust uncanny Valley effect, where likability increased linearly with
Speaker 1: humanoid qualities up to a certain point, and then it
Speaker 1: took a negative dip as the humanoid qualities continued to
Speaker 1: increase past that point, and then once again began to
Speaker 1: rise at the far end of the scale. Now, one
Speaker 1: thing I want to say, just looking at the results
Speaker 1: is it does not appear that people were the most
Speaker 1: bothered by the things that were the most human looking.
Speaker 1: Like given my understanding of the uncanny valley, I would
Speaker 1: have expected the stuff at the very top end of
Speaker 1: the scale to be the most disturbing. But they actually
Speaker 1: kind of liked the stuff at the very top end
Speaker 1: of the scale. It was somewhere closer to the upper
Speaker 1: half middle of the scale that they really didn't like.
Speaker 1: Um So, to whatever extent, there is a real uncanny Valley,
Speaker 1: it might not lie so close to the quote realism
Speaker 1: into the spectrum as we think. They also performed some
Speaker 1: trust experiments by creating a scenario where subjects would be
Speaker 1: asked to trust these robots to invest money for them,
Speaker 1: and the results there were basically they claimed that the
Speaker 1: trust uh experiments did show some Uncanny Valley effects, but
Speaker 1: the results were a little more complicated than on the
Speaker 1: straightforward superficial likability scale, the likability really did look like
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley was being displayed. They also performed experiments with
Speaker 1: a more traditional quote controlled series of composed face images,
Speaker 1: so would just be a series of basically the same
Speaker 1: face as a robot than a little bit more human,
Speaker 1: a little bit more human, little bit more human on
Speaker 1: this gradient of human nous. And they generally claimed to
Speaker 1: find that there was evidence for the Uncanny Valley effect
Speaker 1: in both likability and trust with both the why caught
Speaker 1: robot image samples and with these composed face images that
Speaker 1: they came up with. But as always, more studies are needed.
Speaker 1: But that looks like there is one study showing pretty
Speaker 1: solid evidence that there is something like an uncanny Valley effect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I like the idea that that that that it's
Speaker 1: it's an uncanny valley, but maybe it's just a more
Speaker 1: more nuanced from a a topographical standpoint. You know, they're
Speaker 1: they're more a little little bumps and little valleys within
Speaker 1: the overall valley, little caves you can crawl into and
Speaker 1: just yourself inside, and maybe even caves that turn into
Speaker 1: tunnels that emerge on the other side. Yeah, that that's
Speaker 1: an interesting thing. I mean, like they point out that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of variability in their data. Actually, like
Speaker 1: it wasn't um If you look at their their plot
Speaker 1: chart of where all the data points fall and then
Speaker 1: they plot a line going through it. If you plot
Speaker 1: a line going through all their data, it does show
Speaker 1: the uncanny valley effect. But you know, there there are
Speaker 1: outliers all over the place, like there is some there
Speaker 1: are some robots that are just consistently more like more
Speaker 1: than the other ones. I find it interestingly that the
Speaker 1: some of the higher rated ones, or at least uh
Speaker 1: I think what number seventy nine in particular, kind of
Speaker 1: looks like a generic human as opposed to say, go
Speaker 1: down to seventy four that looks like a very specific
Speaker 1: human like if I had to pick him or pick
Speaker 1: the human he's patterned after, assumingly out of a police lineup,
Speaker 1: I feel like I'd be able to do it. But
Speaker 1: also seventy four looks angry. I'm sorry, folks, you can't
Speaker 1: see what we're talking about, but it's frowning at you,
Speaker 1: kind of like should I kill all humans or just
Speaker 1: shrug it off? And maybe two day's the day that
Speaker 1: does introduce There are a lot of complicating factors here,
Speaker 1: and the authors acknowledged this, like, these images don't all
Speaker 1: have necessarily the same emotional affect, like some of them
Speaker 1: seem happy, some seem unhappy. There's enough variability across the
Speaker 1: board that you can think you're getting a reasonably decent
Speaker 1: answer when you plot reactions across all samples. But yeah,
Speaker 1: there's definitely a lot of different stuff going on here
Speaker 1: in addition to just being more or less human. I
Speaker 1: like how thirty four on our on our chart here
Speaker 1: it seems to rely heavily on animated mustache and eyebrows.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, what is that? It looks like a It
Speaker 1: looks like a very mustache. I can't add to what
Speaker 1: you've just said. It's got a white mustache and brow
Speaker 1: and beard, and it's saying by it looks like a
Speaker 1: lot of these incomplete puppets are stripped away puppets, you
Speaker 1: see where they're like, all right, we got a lot
Speaker 1: of work to do on this thing, but at least
Speaker 1: we got the eyebrows in a mustache in place. But see,
Speaker 1: I find that one very likable. It doesn't look very
Speaker 1: human at all, but it's very I want to play
Speaker 1: with it. Yeah, okay, Robert, Well, we've got a bunch
Speaker 1: of more stuff to talk about, but I think we
Speaker 1: should call it there and come back and finish our
Speaker 1: discussion of the Uncanny Valley next time. Yeah, we'll get
Speaker 1: into we'll go beyond the Uncanny Valley. Yeah, so we'll
Speaker 1: we'll talk about what might cause the Uncanny Valley effect
Speaker 1: to what it were extent it does exist, and we
Speaker 1: can talk about you know, what happens when you ascend
Speaker 1: that that far slow? All right? Well, hey, in the meantime,
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