Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there
Speaker 1: doing the robot, which means this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 1: Robot stot. I knew i'd get a laughout. EA, sooner
Speaker 1: or later? Did you do the robot? Can you do
Speaker 1: the robot? I think I've seen you do pretty bad robot.
Speaker 1: I don't know about pretty bad robot. I can do
Speaker 1: a pretty great robot, that's what you've seen. I can't
Speaker 1: do any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either,
Speaker 1: and didn't really. If if you're claim to fame is
Speaker 1: like a really great robot dance, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: take up some other hobbies as well, kind of round
Speaker 1: that out. You don't want them to be the only
Speaker 1: thing you're good at, right, because if you list that
Speaker 1: on the dating site, you might turn ladies off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: according to e Harmony, Yeah, that's foreshadowing. I love that one,
Speaker 1: don't you. Yeah, that's some issues with that whole Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll get to that. This is tad all right. Well,
Speaker 1: let's start the at the beginning. Almost the beginning. Chuck,
Speaker 1: let's go back to nineteen seventy, which was the beginning
Speaker 1: of the greatest decade in the history of humanity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: neither one of us were born yet I can finally
Speaker 1: even say that I'm still not even born. It must
Speaker 1: feel good. Yeah, okay, well, welcome to the club. I guess. Thanks.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen seventy, we're not just going just anywhere
Speaker 1: at nights seven, We're going to Japan in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Japan was pretty cool in the seventies. Yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of bell bottoms, a lot of ninja running around. Still, um,
Speaker 1: there were calculators being wheelded all over the place. Probably
Speaker 1: it was a good time, good good time for Japan, right,
Speaker 1: and one of the one of the things that was
Speaker 1: going on in nineteen seventy. I could not, for the
Speaker 1: life of me find what issue of this journal it
Speaker 1: came out in what month, But at some point in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy there was an obscure journal, a Japanese academic
Speaker 1: journal called Energy, and at some point during that year
Speaker 1: it published a article by a Japanese roboticist, and his
Speaker 1: name is Massa Hiro Mori. Thank you, I have a
Speaker 1: lot of practice, and uh, Massa Hiro Omori uh published
Speaker 1: this article and he named it Bukimi no Tani gen
Speaker 1: show is actually the full name of the whole thing.
Speaker 1: And as we'll see, it's kind of difficult to translate
Speaker 1: into English, right, and it took many, many years after
Speaker 1: he wrote this article for it to be translated into
Speaker 1: English for anybody even try to attempt it. So basically,
Speaker 1: Mori was this robotic cyst and he wrote this essay
Speaker 1: and at the time he just put it out there
Speaker 1: and went back to work, started teaching more and more roboticists.
Speaker 1: The whole new generation of roboticists learned under him and
Speaker 1: his his work just kind of sat there. Um unobserved
Speaker 1: that article, i should say, and then in two thousand
Speaker 1: five a rough translation of it was leaked out wasn't
Speaker 1: intended for publication, and the world entirely changed, right because
Speaker 1: Massa Hiro Morty had in his article put his finger
Speaker 1: on something that no one had before in his capacities
Speaker 1: a roboticist and a human and that was what we
Speaker 1: call today the uncanny Valley. Yeah, so that's um the
Speaker 1: idea that, uh, you're making a robot and we'll see
Speaker 1: this apply some more than just robots. But in his case,
Speaker 1: you're making a robot and you want to make it
Speaker 1: look like a person um, which I guess not all roboticists,
Speaker 1: some of them like the clunky jets and style robots
Speaker 1: like Rosy. But I guess if you're Mori, you're you're
Speaker 1: on the path to designing lifelike robots. And the closer
Speaker 1: you get to that lifelike look, everything's going great. Everything's
Speaker 1: going great, people are like, this is so cool, this
Speaker 1: is so cool, and then all of a sudden, people
Speaker 1: go oh like right as it approaches it's most or basically,
Speaker 1: when it reaches its most lifelike capacity, that this whoever's
Speaker 1: making it can conjure people are repulsed by it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is something that most people who ever hear of
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley are like, yeah, you know, that's I've
Speaker 1: noticed that. That's happened to me before too. But the
Speaker 1: thing is, Chuck, it doesn't it doesn't actually make sense, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we know a robot is a robot. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you could be afraid that it's gonna like pick
Speaker 1: you up and break you in two or something like
Speaker 1: a cartoon, but that's different than being creeped out by
Speaker 1: like why would we be creeped out by a robot?
Speaker 1: And this is what Morey put his finger on, was
Speaker 1: there's something to this and it doesn't make sense, and
Speaker 1: he he didn't. It wasn't even just um this article
Speaker 1: that he wrote. He created a graph as well that's
Speaker 1: become quite famous that um really kind of gets the
Speaker 1: point across more than anything else. Yeah, And he wasn't
Speaker 1: even the first person to to go over this and
Speaker 1: to put a put some thought to it. Freud of course,
Speaker 1: because he'd like to think about everything. He thought about
Speaker 1: a little bit. And before Freud, there was a a
Speaker 1: Geman name anst yinched. Oh nice. I did not realize
Speaker 1: that's how his last name should be pronounced. That's good stuff.
Speaker 1: I think I put a tea on the end, but
Speaker 1: the teas in the middle, yinch. Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 1: I've been saying, Gentch. We don't. We'll have to look
Speaker 1: that up. Then. I think you're no. I think of
Speaker 1: the two of us, you're you got the German down. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he had a little term called um heimlich uh
Speaker 1: that he called it so like you know, different languages
Speaker 1: had different names for it. Um and you go back
Speaker 1: in time, all the way back to like the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: and people were and I guess you know, robots didn't
Speaker 1: look super lifelike back then, but whatever their version of
Speaker 1: life like was. Uh. In the sixteen hundreds, people were like,
Speaker 1: I don't like that. Why is it looking at me? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's got a quill and it's writing things. But like
Speaker 1: you said, Maury made this graph because he was a roboticist,
Speaker 1: and he thought, you know, let's look at this on
Speaker 1: a plotted out so we can stare at it. And
Speaker 1: on the X axis he had human likeness. Then on
Speaker 1: the y axis he had affinity, like whether or not
Speaker 1: you like the way this thing looks. And just as
Speaker 1: we're talking about um, the graph went up and up
Speaker 1: as uh, things got more lifelike and people like the
Speaker 1: way look And then at a certain point there's that
Speaker 1: valley there's a big dip. Uh. That really just kind
Speaker 1: of says it all right, And again this all makes
Speaker 1: sense intuitively, but as we'll see, that's it's been very
Speaker 1: difficult to prove. And one of the reasons why it's
Speaker 1: confounded research thus far is because we were not even
Speaker 1: sure what more meant by some of the words he chose,
Speaker 1: at least as far as translating them to English. Right.
Speaker 1: Um For example, boukimi. Right, it was translated in two
Speaker 1: thousand five as uncanny, but um again that that original
Speaker 1: translation was not intended for publication, but it leaked out,
Speaker 1: and so Uncanny Valley became, you know, the the way
Speaker 1: we all think of it here in the West. But
Speaker 1: boukimi more closely resembles something like eerie. Like I've seen
Speaker 1: it explain that, Um, a word like boukimi means more
Speaker 1: than uncanny is just weird or remarkable or noteworthy. It's
Speaker 1: not necessarily something that gives you the creeps. Boukimi is
Speaker 1: something that that gives you the creeps, like Steve Bukimi's exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: So bukimi probably more should be should have been translated
Speaker 1: the Eerie Valley. But by the time an actual official
Speaker 1: translation that um Mori signed off on came out in
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, the cat was out of the bag.
Speaker 1: Everybody knew of it as the Uncanny Valley, and there's
Speaker 1: no way anybody who's gonna come back and be like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: everybody stop calling it that. It's now the Eerie Valley. Okay, right,
Speaker 1: all right, And it may be one of those things
Speaker 1: where we're so used to uncanny Valley now that it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine eerie Valley. But right, I think that
Speaker 1: was the issue. Yeah, Like, nobody's gonna go along with that.
Speaker 1: So this graph, like I said, it starts off on
Speaker 1: that left hand side, and this is where you have
Speaker 1: things that are super robotic. Um like you know, a
Speaker 1: packaging robot in a factory, um that you know, apparently
Speaker 1: most people don't have funness for I do because I
Speaker 1: love mechanical processes, um right, right, Okay, So there's there's
Speaker 1: part of the problem. It's like that's not necessarily the
Speaker 1: kind of feeling that massa Hiro Morty was talking about.
Speaker 1: He was like, yeah, yeah, you're interested in robotics and
Speaker 1: robotic arms and the industrial processes, and you love watching
Speaker 1: how it's made. Right. What he was talking about was
Speaker 1: more like how it resembles a human and then how
Speaker 1: it makes you feel in relation to its resemblance of
Speaker 1: a human. Right. Well, in that case, it makes me
Speaker 1: feel nothing because it doesn't look at all like a human. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So that would be at about the origin of the graph.
Speaker 1: It has no resemblance to a human really, and it's
Speaker 1: not a listening any real affinity in you at all
Speaker 1: as far as it looking like a human, right, but
Speaker 1: lots of affinity as a thing that's just that's called props.
Speaker 1: So you go a little bit further on the graph
Speaker 1: and then you have things like um little stuffed animals
Speaker 1: and uh no. C three po is is a common
Speaker 1: one that's mentioned because C three p O UM, you know,
Speaker 1: is built to look like a human. He does a
Speaker 1: great robot. It talks like a human and acts like
Speaker 1: a human. But when it comes to that face, and
Speaker 1: as we'll see, the face is kind of the key
Speaker 1: to all this um. For the most part, C three
Speaker 1: po looks nothing like a human in the face. So
Speaker 1: everything is still good and people love C three po. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you're looking at the graph, C three p
Speaker 1: o is going up in human likeness because he kind
Speaker 1: of you know, he's got some some commonality there, and
Speaker 1: we're feeling affinity for him based on that human likeness.
Speaker 1: So it's he's going up. Okay, We're going everything's going
Speaker 1: pretty well so far, right, Chuck, that's right, Okay, So
Speaker 1: then we're gonna start hitting some areas where things start
Speaker 1: looking a little more human, a lot more human, I
Speaker 1: would say than c three p o, like say the
Speaker 1: characters in mo Wanna or Frozen, uh picks our characters
Speaker 1: that kind of thing where where they look like they're
Speaker 1: supposed to be human, like they're based on human, but
Speaker 1: they have very exaggerated features that you would never confuse
Speaker 1: at first glance for an actual human. Right, So they
Speaker 1: have like bi a guys, small noses, things that make
Speaker 1: them cute, right, And so our affinity for them is
Speaker 1: going up as the human likeness is going up. Again,
Speaker 1: things are going really well so far, that's right, because
Speaker 1: in Mowanna and Frozen they look a little bit more
Speaker 1: like people, and we like them a lot more for
Speaker 1: that reason. And then, like you said earlier, out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: the whole thing, this line that's just been going up
Speaker 1: very pleasantly, and a nice little slope just drops downward, right,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't drop just downward, it goes actually below
Speaker 1: the X axis into negative territory. And now this is
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley, that's right, And that's why it has
Speaker 1: that name because it's a valley, right, And this is
Speaker 1: where those things like really really life like androids live,
Speaker 1: or um corpses live, or zombies live. Because Maury he
Speaker 1: he had the idea that if something's moving, is even
Speaker 1: creepier than something similar to it that's not moving. So
Speaker 1: he actually created two lines on this graph, one for
Speaker 1: things that are animate and one for things that are inanimate.
Speaker 1: So if you look at this uncanny valley on the
Speaker 1: inanimate line, the non moving line, you've got corpses are
Speaker 1: at the bottom of it. But if you look at
Speaker 1: the animate line, it's even it dips even further below
Speaker 1: than the inanimate line, and at the bottom of those
Speaker 1: are zombies. So dead people up and moving around and
Speaker 1: saying brains is as creepy as it gets as far
Speaker 1: as this graph is concerned. Yeah, and he Maria wasn't
Speaker 1: the only one that um earns yinch that we talked about.
Speaker 1: The German psychiatrists. Uh. He also talked about the fact
Speaker 1: that if you are looking at something that should not
Speaker 1: be moving and it moves. Um, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: we can all agree that a baby doll that suddenly
Speaker 1: turns its head and looks at you probably one of
Speaker 1: the creepier things you can witness, right, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's about as creepy as it gets or um, have
Speaker 1: you ever been to an open casket funeral? A few?
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan at all. No, it is it
Speaker 1: makes sense. You know, we've really kind of closed or
Speaker 1: put a lot of space in between us and death,
Speaker 1: way more than we used to have in like the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century sit up with the dead. Sure, right, so
Speaker 1: this seems to be like kind of a holdover from that.
Speaker 1: But if you've ever been to uh an open casket
Speaker 1: funeral and have just stared at the corpse long enough,
Speaker 1: like maybe it's arm or it's fingers or something, your
Speaker 1: brain is so anticipating that they it's about to start
Speaker 1: moving that sometimes you can creep yourself out and and
Speaker 1: make yourself think you did actually see it move. You'll
Speaker 1: also be asked to leave the funeral. Well you shouldn't
Speaker 1: be like giving a commentary about this out loud, but
Speaker 1: you can. You know, you can do it to pass
Speaker 1: the time in the funeral if you're looking to to
Speaker 1: kill some time. Uh So, here's the thing with all this, Um,
Speaker 1: we know this happens because everyone kind of has this feeling,
Speaker 1: but no one and all this research has been done,
Speaker 1: and no one is exactly sure why this happens. So, uh,
Speaker 1: Maury's essay and especially once it was translated, Um, a
Speaker 1: lot of research started happening in this area. And uh,
Speaker 1: it's problematic though, because there are there are a few
Speaker 1: different problems. One is, well, it's it's subjective. This dependent variable,
Speaker 1: whether you have an affinity for something is very subjective,
Speaker 1: so it's hard to kind of nail that down scientifically, right,
Speaker 1: all right, So the number two is human likeness, right,
Speaker 1: this is the independent variable. And if you have human likeness,
Speaker 1: like what does that mean? Like what looks human? What
Speaker 1: doesn't look human? But we haven't pinned that down. So like,
Speaker 1: if you can't pin the dependent variable down and the
Speaker 1: independent variable down, it makes it really tough to study correct.
Speaker 1: And then there's a third one too. I love this one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The third one is, uh, you know, the original hypothesis.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have a mathematical model that like really specifies
Speaker 1: the shape of this curve, so it's still hypothetical, I guess, right,
Speaker 1: Which means that so if you look at Mori's graph,
Speaker 1: it was he just basically made a line, right, It
Speaker 1: wasn't based on any studies he'd done. The whole thing
Speaker 1: was really an essay more than anything else. UM. So,
Speaker 1: researchers who are trying to seriously study the scientifically have
Speaker 1: nothing that they're actually trying to place their findings against,
Speaker 1: which leads to uh put it puts them at risk
Speaker 1: for what's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Greatest name fallacy
Speaker 1: around and um it's it's based on the idea that
Speaker 1: if you take a sharpshooter in Texas and have them
Speaker 1: shoot at the side of a barn a bunch of times,
Speaker 1: some of them are inevitably going to hit the barn,
Speaker 1: and then the Texas sharpshooter walks up and then draws
Speaker 1: the bull's eye around the bullets that he already sunk
Speaker 1: into the side of the barn. That's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
Speaker 1: It's ignoring data like the ones where he missed the
Speaker 1: barn in favor of ones that fall into what you're
Speaker 1: looking for, the bullet holes in the barn. You could
Speaker 1: do the same thing with the um data that you
Speaker 1: get from testing the Uncanny Valley if you have no
Speaker 1: model to fit it into already. Yeah, I think they
Speaker 1: would have done better if they would have just instead
Speaker 1: of trying to prove something, uh, to maybe just research
Speaker 1: and call it a thought experiment, you know, right, But
Speaker 1: people are taking it seriously and we'll we'll talk about
Speaker 1: some of this research right after this, chuck. Alright, So
Speaker 1: we're back. And despite the fact that this is really
Speaker 1: tough to study, it's not even established that it's a
Speaker 1: real thing in everyone's mind. By the way, Um, there
Speaker 1: there are people out there who are really studying the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley and trying to pin it down. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: of these people is at Dartmouth College psychologists. And I
Speaker 1: didn't look up there mascot, the the the pub darts,
Speaker 1: the fighting pub darts at Dartmouth College. We're gonna hear
Speaker 1: from Dartmouth. But her name is Talia Wheatley. Um. And
Speaker 1: she's done some research and has found that it's not
Speaker 1: just like some uniquely Western thing or American thing. It's
Speaker 1: kind of all over the world. She studied tribes and
Speaker 1: Cambodia and they have the same sensitivities to these things
Speaker 1: that look human but aren't human. Uh. And they've even
Speaker 1: found that and I think it kind of all comes
Speaker 1: down to the eyes. But they found just looking at
Speaker 1: the eye can be enough. Yeah, Um, somebody can tell
Speaker 1: whether it's a human or not just looking at a
Speaker 1: picture of the eye, right. Yeah. And that's where I
Speaker 1: think people lose credibility. And and we'll talk about movies
Speaker 1: and sculpture and all that stuff, but they just never
Speaker 1: get you can't get the eyes right, Like, you can't
Speaker 1: put life in lifeless eyes? How are they try? Only
Speaker 1: God can? Uh? And there was this other experiment where they, um,
Speaker 1: you know, like where you can morph a face, uh
Speaker 1: digitally or whatever like that Michael Jackson Black or White video. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think some people are creeped out by that even
Speaker 1: but they would show this dull image and it would
Speaker 1: morph into a human face. And basically they would have
Speaker 1: people mark where they where they thought that it would
Speaker 1: look more human than doll and it you know, it
Speaker 1: landed about the mark as far as morphing into human,
Speaker 1: which I mean you can't really apply that necessarily, but
Speaker 1: just it's interesting. Offhand point is about where the Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley happened in Maury's mind. Yeah, I would think it
Speaker 1: would be higher than that, but um, yeah, it's still
Speaker 1: super interesting. Um. And you were saying that the eyes,
Speaker 1: and that's what you're betting on is that it's going
Speaker 1: to turn out to be the eyes, right. So, trying
Speaker 1: to investigate what constitutes human likeness, there's a researcher named
Speaker 1: Angela Tinwell, and she basically says, like, yes, it's all
Speaker 1: about the upper facial features and that we we detect those,
Speaker 1: we we read those, and so if there's any anything
Speaker 1: that's even just slightly off in like you know, the eyes,
Speaker 1: or the brows or the wrinkles, that form um that
Speaker 1: will lead to the uncanny valley that's the creeping part
Speaker 1: or the smile too. She also says, well, yeah, and
Speaker 1: all these things kind of come down to evolution, and
Speaker 1: her point is like, you can't battle millions of years
Speaker 1: of evolution that his honed are our dumb, little human
Speaker 1: brain to detect something that's off about a face. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's just too much to overcome. Basically, this other researcher
Speaker 1: named Carl F. McDorman, who's from the University of Indiana,
Speaker 1: who actually he's basically like dedicated his career to this. Now. Um,
Speaker 1: he found that certain kinds of people if you do
Speaker 1: like a personality inventory before testing for uncanny Valley sensitivity,
Speaker 1: some types of people are predictably more sensitive to the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley than others. Specifically, he found that very religious
Speaker 1: people that makes total sense. Yeah, neurotic people, um, and uh,
Speaker 1: people with high sensitivity to animal reminders. It's basically anything
Speaker 1: that reminds you that, hey, you're super civilized and you
Speaker 1: drive a car and you know how to play poker. Um,
Speaker 1: but you're still an animal, just as much as that
Speaker 1: ape over there is an animal reminder. Um. People who
Speaker 1: are sensitive to that kind of thing tend to go
Speaker 1: off on the uncanny Valley as well. And then people
Speaker 1: who are anxious are more likely to experience the uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley as far as McDorman is concerned. Yeah, that interesting
Speaker 1: makes sense too, because they're probably just more prone to
Speaker 1: be I don't know, just have a reaction to a
Speaker 1: lot of things like this. Right. But but we should
Speaker 1: say the science and all this, the fact that the
Speaker 1: independent and the dependent variable are still not defined, the
Speaker 1: science is this. This is like the scientific equivalent of
Speaker 1: that backward over the head half court basketball shot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the level of science that these people are carrying
Speaker 1: out at this point because they're they're a lot of
Speaker 1: them sadly are conducting experiments based on something that again
Speaker 1: doesn't have a set dependent or independent variable. So how
Speaker 1: can you do that? As my question, Well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean because in each experiment, they're going to be using
Speaker 1: different uh stimuli, um, different faces, whether it's a doll
Speaker 1: or a wax figure or a c g I character,
Speaker 1: And then they're gonna be doing different things and have
Speaker 1: different expressions, and each person has their own subjective takes,
Speaker 1: so it is very tough thing to kind of nail down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think some of them are actually trying to
Speaker 1: form the basis of this field of study right now,
Speaker 1: they're doing the groundwork. But I think some of them
Speaker 1: also are like just chasing headlines, Like there's no better
Speaker 1: way to get get into the media cycle with your
Speaker 1: study than than releasing some five endings on the Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley people just love. Uh. One thing I thought was
Speaker 1: interesting was, um, at Princeton they tried this with monkeys
Speaker 1: and they found the same thing happened when they had
Speaker 1: these realistic looking but fake monkey faces. The monkeys were
Speaker 1: like it turned away. Um. It did make me think though,
Speaker 1: like all the you've seen these situations where like an
Speaker 1: orphaned animal has a a creepy puppet mother. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: know exactly what you're talking about, and they seem to
Speaker 1: like that. But however, and this is a bit of
Speaker 1: a spoiler, but um, towards the end of this article,
Speaker 1: it points out that human babies don't have this reaction
Speaker 1: at first either, and that it's kind of learned. So
Speaker 1: maybe that explains it. Maybe with the animals, I know
Speaker 1: you're talking about that that cage, Like, why are monkey mother?
Speaker 1: It's super creepy? Is it? Black and white photo? Well, no,
Speaker 1: I mean they do it. There's all kinds of animals. Well,
Speaker 1: they'll they have like a fake tiger or a fake
Speaker 1: duck or whatever, just so the animal will feed or
Speaker 1: I mean it's usually an animal that that milks from
Speaker 1: the mother, I guess. But um, it's a common thing
Speaker 1: they do for orphaned milk feeding or breastfeed animals. And
Speaker 1: they're always creepy. Huh. Well, I mean to us, but
Speaker 1: to a dumb baby monkey, they're just like, sweet give
Speaker 1: me the teat. There's a T shirt maybe even a
Speaker 1: band name sweet give Me the Teat. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: kind of falls into the long band named category. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing is, not everyone agrees with this. The
Speaker 1: whole thing like you said earlier, there's a man named
Speaker 1: David Hanson and he's a roboticist as well, and plain
Speaker 1: oh Texas, and uh. He did a very very basic study.
Speaker 1: It was a survey where they showed images of two
Speaker 1: different robots that were animated to simulate human facial expressions
Speaker 1: and basically just asked, Hey, what do you think of
Speaker 1: this and said I like them? Yeah. Can you see
Speaker 1: why people have trouble with this study? Though? Yeah, he
Speaker 1: said not one person said they were disturbed. Okay, sounds
Speaker 1: good for the most part, though, Studies into the uncanny
Speaker 1: valley or like, now, we we're finding something here, although
Speaker 1: we should be suspicious of ones that basically show the
Speaker 1: uncanny valley that Moriy just graphed out of his like
Speaker 1: with freehand, Like if you if you've come across the
Speaker 1: study that shows that same thing, they're probably cherry picking data,
Speaker 1: we got to say, out of his butt. Maybe there
Speaker 1: was another study Edward Schneider at Suny Potsdam in New York.
Speaker 1: I bet they don't even have a mascot. They got
Speaker 1: together characters from cartoons and video games, everyone from Mickey
Speaker 1: Mouse to law Acroft and who is very attractive by
Speaker 1: the way she's a computer character. Yeah. Well no, I'm
Speaker 1: talking about playing tomb Rater. Oh I never played. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when it first came out, you know, I played tomb
Speaker 1: Rater and I was like, oh, I look at her
Speaker 1: act kind of hut. She Well, she's she gets a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff done. That's very attractive. That's true. That means, well,
Speaker 1: she travels a lot, she's an independent person. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what I meant. I was attracted to her mind in
Speaker 1: her adventures. Uh So, anyway, they asked people in this study, Um,
Speaker 1: how attractive do you think these characters are? Or how
Speaker 1: repulsive do you think they are? And again there was
Speaker 1: um a graph with a dip in it at a
Speaker 1: certain point, as you would expect. Yep. Careful, careful, everybody.
Speaker 1: So if you're if you're a robot designer, right, one
Speaker 1: of the things like even back in his essay written
Speaker 1: in nine seventy, Masahiro Morey said, um, there's there's problems
Speaker 1: here with movement. There's problems here with the smile. It
Speaker 1: has something to do with the face, right, Um, and
Speaker 1: it's somebody else said I don't remember who it was,
Speaker 1: but there's there always seems to be a lag time
Speaker 1: between how realistic a designer can make a robot and
Speaker 1: how realistic a an engineer can make that robot look right,
Speaker 1: and that that disconnected. Maury's mind was a big part
Speaker 1: of the on Canny Valley, but he also seemed to
Speaker 1: focus on the smile on the eyes and one of
Speaker 1: the things that's at stake, like besides this just being
Speaker 1: like an interesting topic of discussion, like, there are actual
Speaker 1: real world implications for this whole thing, right, Like, if
Speaker 1: you're a robot designer, you want to create something that's
Speaker 1: not going to freak people out, because the whole purpose
Speaker 1: of robots is to interact with humans, and you want
Speaker 1: them to interact with humans. I should say life like
Speaker 1: looking at robots, right, because like four motor companies ever
Speaker 1: gonna buy an android that looks human to just work
Speaker 1: on an assembly line when they can get the same
Speaker 1: thing that does the same job cheaper when it just
Speaker 1: looks like a robotic arm or something. Right, the whole
Speaker 1: purpose of a lifelike looking robots because that robot is
Speaker 1: being designed to interact with humans. And if you are
Speaker 1: going to run into this spot, some people say it's
Speaker 1: not even a valley. Some people think it's insurmountable a
Speaker 1: cliff or a wall. So if you're gonna run up
Speaker 1: against this, you want to figure out how to overcome
Speaker 1: it because you don't want to creep people out with
Speaker 1: your creations. Well, and you don't want to spend a
Speaker 1: lot of money, um to develop a robotic Walmart greeter
Speaker 1: at every store because it's it's happening like this is
Speaker 1: coming people. Yeah, there's a robot called Geminoid F or
Speaker 1: acterroid f depends on who you ask. I've also seen
Speaker 1: he called Ellie, and she is out of this lab
Speaker 1: by a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguro, and he is probably
Speaker 1: the world's leading roboticist. If you've seen any life like android,
Speaker 1: it probably came out of this guy's lab, right, And
Speaker 1: she is starting to get out there in the world.
Speaker 1: She's been a debriefer of soldiers coming back from more
Speaker 1: with PTSD, based on the idea that they might share
Speaker 1: more with a robot that they knew was just a
Speaker 1: robot than they would an actual human. Um. She's in
Speaker 1: a play. She stars as an android, right. And then
Speaker 1: there's Casper. There's a little robot called Casper. Yeah, Casper
Speaker 1: is a robot boy with a great cause created to
Speaker 1: help children with autism learn to read facial emotions. If
Speaker 1: you look up photos of both of these giminoid, f
Speaker 1: uh looks great and really like Ishiguro is doing great,
Speaker 1: great work. Casper looks terrifying, right, and so Casper is creepy.
Speaker 1: But that's not his purpose at all, right, his purpose
Speaker 1: is to like teach kids with autism how to connect.
Speaker 1: But if he's repelling them through this uncanny valley, he's
Speaker 1: defeating the purpose. Well, they should go to Ishi Gurro
Speaker 1: and say, hey, we have this great cause, can you
Speaker 1: make us something that doesn't look like the stuff of nightmares?
Speaker 1: Right exactly? I wonder if Casper has been um effective,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know. I don't know. Now I
Speaker 1: feel bad I didn't look into that. Well, I just
Speaker 1: I don't know. He's very creepy looking. I agree wholeheartedly.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like, no, he's not finished, get back
Speaker 1: to the drawing board. Either that or and this is
Speaker 1: what Morey said, like go the other way, like just
Speaker 1: make him not um he himan at all, just cute
Speaker 1: or approachable. So the robotists are not the only ones
Speaker 1: who are facing this chuck. There is a a pretty
Speaker 1: powerful moneyed contingent of people who are interested stakeholders in
Speaker 1: overcoming the uncanny Valley, or at least figuring out if
Speaker 1: it's totally insurmountable. And that is Hollywood. Yeah. Um, Hollywood
Speaker 1: has a sort of a rich history of getting it
Speaker 1: wrong when it comes to creepy c g I characters. Um.
Speaker 1: Pixar had their very first short film. Actually it's called
Speaker 1: Tin Toy, uh, a little five minutes short, and they
Speaker 1: showed it to this you know, this proceded toy story
Speaker 1: and everything. Yeah, it was actually kind of like the
Speaker 1: outline of toy stories plot. Yeah, but they showed it
Speaker 1: to test audiences and they made the mistake of making
Speaker 1: the baby Billy look too realistic, and everyone loved Tin
Speaker 1: Toy and everyone hated Billy. Yeah have you seen it?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, he's pretty hateable for sure, and he
Speaker 1: has the antagonist, but he he struck some chord with
Speaker 1: viewers that that Pixar did not mean to strike. And
Speaker 1: they actually, I mean, this is extraordinarily fortunate for Pixarre.
Speaker 1: This is very early on in their history. And um,
Speaker 1: they they learned from it. Actually they're like, Okay, note
Speaker 1: to self, don't try to make any of these characters life. Like,
Speaker 1: let's go a different direction, and so they came up
Speaker 1: with those um exaggerated features that we've all just come
Speaker 1: to know and love. Yeah, which was a great, great
Speaker 1: direction to go in, obviously, because they've had tons of
Speaker 1: success with that model. Right, you can make the case
Speaker 1: that it may have saved the company because other companies
Speaker 1: and other movies, for sure, have not been nearly as fortunate. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the first big photo real computer animated movies
Speaker 1: was Final Fantasy Colon the Spirits Within. You should never
Speaker 1: have a colon in your movie title, by the way,
Speaker 1: that was the first mistake. But this one was from
Speaker 1: two thousand one and based on the video game, and
Speaker 1: it was off putting to a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: it was a big, big bomb for Columbia Pictures. And
Speaker 1: but this is before Uncanny Valley had really been established,
Speaker 1: before Maury's essay was translated, so reviewers didn't quite know
Speaker 1: what to say. Now they would just say we've tumbled
Speaker 1: into the Uncanny Valley again, but they would say things
Speaker 1: like Peter Traver's great reviewer from Rolling Stone said, at first,
Speaker 1: it's fun to watch the characters. Ellipsis ellipsips But what's
Speaker 1: an ellipsis is that two of them, couple of them.
Speaker 1: But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a
Speaker 1: mechanical quality in the movements, familiar voices emerging from the
Speaker 1: mouths of replicants erect a distance. Yeah, so he's describing
Speaker 1: young Canny Valley. He just didn't have the name of
Speaker 1: it yet. Um. And then a couple of years later
Speaker 1: the Polar Express, which became I think even more famous
Speaker 1: than Final Fantasy as far as the Uncanny Valley goes.
Speaker 1: But again, it's like you said, you know, the reviewers
Speaker 1: didn't know how quite to put their finger on it,
Speaker 1: and I'm not quite sure how Final Fantasy was done,
Speaker 1: but I know that polar Express used similar um software
Speaker 1: and hardware to what roboticists are using now, where it's
Speaker 1: like motion capture, but rather than translating the motion to
Speaker 1: the robot, it's translating the motion into like a digital
Speaker 1: three D rendering of the character. Right, So polar Express
Speaker 1: was really really expressive, but not quite there, so it
Speaker 1: fell really hard in the Uncanny Valley, and um, I
Speaker 1: think David Germaine of the Associated Press uh compared the
Speaker 1: kids in this heartwarming family Christmas movie to the Children
Speaker 1: from Village of the Damned, which is not what you want.
Speaker 1: It's not at all what the studio wanted, and I
Speaker 1: think it lost a pretty decent amount of money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was another one of uh. And these are all,
Speaker 1: by the way, courtesy of Robert Zemecas he really had
Speaker 1: his He went all in on this technology. I don't
Speaker 1: know why. I think he just I think sometimes you
Speaker 1: as an artist, you can get so wrapped up and
Speaker 1: the coolness of wow, look what we can do now
Speaker 1: that you don't step back and look at what you're doing, like,
Speaker 1: should should we be doing this? Because he also had
Speaker 1: a part in the Bowolf movie in two thousand seven
Speaker 1: that was a huge bomb. Um in The New York
Speaker 1: Times said this about that people who are meant to
Speaker 1: be enraged, who are at risk of plummeting to their deaths,
Speaker 1: just look a little out of sorts. When it was over,
Speaker 1: I felt relieved to be back in the company of
Speaker 1: un creepy flesh and blood humans again. Sad and then uh,
Speaker 1: just the Adventures of Tintin. Yeah, I really liked Tintin,
Speaker 1: though I did too. I think Spielberg, I mean, there
Speaker 1: is that Uncanny Valley a little bit, but the story
Speaker 1: in the movie were so good he overcame that. I
Speaker 1: think I was about to say, I think Spielberg has
Speaker 1: come the closest to to overcoming that chasm of anybody.
Speaker 1: But did he do it through good storytelling or through
Speaker 1: the eyes I I don't know. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it I don't know if it was a combination of
Speaker 1: the two. Um, I don't know, but it is extraordinarily,
Speaker 1: it's an extraordit. So you know those that that that
Speaker 1: stuff you'll see every once a while, which somebody does
Speaker 1: like what Beavis and butt Head would actually look like
Speaker 1: in real life or what Charlie Brown was in real life. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's still has kind of got a cartoonish quality
Speaker 1: to it. It's the same thing with the Tintin movie.
Speaker 1: But it was like it was as if you were
Speaker 1: living in a dementia and where humans looked somewhat cartoonish.
Speaker 1: Is that making any sense or does that just make
Speaker 1: the whole thing even harder to understand? No? I get that.
Speaker 1: So so he somehow was like, here, I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to nail what humans look like. I'm going to take
Speaker 1: you to another world where these people live and if
Speaker 1: you lived in this world, you would look like this too.
Speaker 1: It's it's weird. It's like he he bridged an uncanny
Speaker 1: valley that doesn't exist in this dimension. Yeah, he built
Speaker 1: a temporary disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley. I think
Speaker 1: the biggest example in recent years was, or the one
Speaker 1: that got the most attention was in Rogue One. Did
Speaker 1: you see that? The Star Wars movie? I haven't a
Speaker 1: seen any of the new Star Wars ones except for
Speaker 1: a seen the first six, I guess, but none of
Speaker 1: the two new new ones. Uh. Well, in Rogue One,
Speaker 1: they completely bring back to life Grand Moth Tarkin, who
Speaker 1: was played by the deceased Peter Cushing, and they brought
Speaker 1: him back as a character in this movie and in
Speaker 1: the theater like when he when it first happens, he's
Speaker 1: got his back to you and it's sort of in
Speaker 1: the shadows and you're like, oh wow, like that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know that they would do that, but
Speaker 1: they they got too comfortable, I think, and uh showed
Speaker 1: too much and gave him too many lines and too
Speaker 1: much light, and then it became uncanny Valley. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. I think about poor Peter Cushing's family having
Speaker 1: to see that. Yeah, I don't know how often they
Speaker 1: just weep during that that movie. Well, I'm curious about
Speaker 1: like life rights and image rights and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: if they had to get that cleared. I don't even
Speaker 1: know that. I'm sure there's a backstory there. Cushing was
Speaker 1: famously mellow that he would have taken a draw off
Speaker 1: his DUBI and been like, that's whatever, man. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think he spent the last year of his life on
Speaker 1: his weed farm in northern California. What about this Mars
Speaker 1: Needs Moms. I had never ever heard of that movie,
Speaker 1: and so I went and watched the trailer and it
Speaker 1: still was like, I have no idea what this is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know that comic strip bloom County. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a huge, huge life along bloom County fan. Okay,
Speaker 1: so Burke, so maybe you know how to say the
Speaker 1: last name. It's Berkeley breathed, her breathed, But I don't
Speaker 1: know if I've ever heard it said out loud breath.
Speaker 1: It sounds nice. Let's go with that. So Berkeley brother,
Speaker 1: the person, the guy who did bloom County. He wrote
Speaker 1: a book, a children's book, called Mars Needs Moms, and
Speaker 1: basically Mars had some sort of shortage of moms, so
Speaker 1: the Martians came and kidnapped human moms and it was
Speaker 1: up to the human kids to go get their moms
Speaker 1: back from Mars. Right, pretty cute little premise, but they
Speaker 1: took it and ran it through z Mecha's nightmare. Mill
Speaker 1: Um Image Movers Digital was the was the trade name
Speaker 1: of it, but everybody knew it's just steer clear of
Speaker 1: this place, right, And this was like the Apex or
Speaker 1: the what's the opposite of the Apex? The Valley, I guess,
Speaker 1: so the deepest part of the c g I Valley
Speaker 1: of the Uncanny Valley, right, it was what what the
Speaker 1: stuff that they created? It was so off and just
Speaker 1: so spectacularly and colostly off that when I guess Disney
Speaker 1: came along and bought this company that came in looked
Speaker 1: around and said, we're shutting you down. This movie is
Speaker 1: that we're not doing this anymore. What you guys are
Speaker 1: doing here is wrong, um, and you're all going to jail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's my thoughts on that. I watched the trailer and
Speaker 1: it didn't look any worse than any of the other
Speaker 1: ones to me, and in fact I don't know the
Speaker 1: character's names, but there's a kid and then there's this
Speaker 1: one kind of chubby guy in Mars. The chubby guy
Speaker 1: looked pretty good. Actually, I thought. I think this was
Speaker 1: a victim. I bet the movie sucked really bad, and
Speaker 1: I think it was the last straw the end of
Speaker 1: all these Uncanny Valley failures. Yeah, because this again, this
Speaker 1: is the same company that had created um Polar Express,
Speaker 1: the Nightmare Factory, and a Christmas Carol did not do
Speaker 1: very well either, So yeah, I think it. It definitely
Speaker 1: bore the brunt of its predecessors as well. I but
Speaker 1: I thought this was as bad as it got. If
Speaker 1: you ask me, I totally saw what what Disney saw
Speaker 1: with this one. Anytime something is marked as the thing
Speaker 1: that killed the thing, right, it's always just the last thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, you know, yeah, but it could have also
Speaker 1: been the thing that saved the thing had they gotten
Speaker 1: it right. You know, that's true. So, like I said,
Speaker 1: Mariy was like and every time I say Maury, now
Speaker 1: unless I say it like Morty just saying Maury, think
Speaker 1: I think of the Whigs, Salesman and Goodfellas is like
Speaker 1: give me my money and ray leodis this in their
Speaker 1: laughing because Morey's to pay falls off. Imagine that guy
Speaker 1: is the guy who came up with the young Canny Valley. Okay,
Speaker 1: it gives a full different spin too, right, So Maury says, um,
Speaker 1: you just don't even try. Guys like you're never going
Speaker 1: to be able to do this. Even if you can,
Speaker 1: We're so far away from it. And this is the
Speaker 1: vy he was saying it, and it still holds true.
Speaker 1: Now we're so far away from this that that just
Speaker 1: maybe put your put your emphasis elsewhere. And the example
Speaker 1: he gave was say, like a prosthetic hand, right, rather
Speaker 1: than trying to create a lifelike prosthetic hand, that that
Speaker 1: was in danger of creeping people out, which is the
Speaker 1: opposite of what somebody wearing a prosthetic hand wants when
Speaker 1: they're walking around the prosthetic hand. He said, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe choose some like like would well sanded beautifully grained
Speaker 1: wood in the shape of a human hand. It gets
Speaker 1: the point across this is my hand. I lost my hand,
Speaker 1: I don't have my hand, but there's nothing to be
Speaker 1: creeped out about here. It's kind of beautiful. Looking, isn't it.
Speaker 1: That was Maury's take, and a lot of people side
Speaker 1: with him as well. As a matter of fact, you know,
Speaker 1: I said, I think at the beginning that he was
Speaker 1: already an established roboticist when he wrote The Uncanny Valley
Speaker 1: in NINEV and he went on to teach a lot
Speaker 1: of people roboticists or a lot of roboticists as well.
Speaker 1: And um, that very famous robot uh a s m
Speaker 1: o Asmo, you know, the one I'm talking about. He
Speaker 1: was one of the first ones that could jog in place.
Speaker 1: And he's kind of humanoid for sure, but very cute,
Speaker 1: all white, shiny lacquer plastic. You've seen him before. Um.
Speaker 1: He was created by one of Morey's students, who clearly
Speaker 1: subscribe to Maury's theory that you you're not gonna you're
Speaker 1: not gonna overcome the Uncanny Valley. So just make these
Speaker 1: things exaggerated and non human like, and you'll you'll have
Speaker 1: people love your robot. Yeah. I think that's a good tech. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna take another break here and then
Speaker 1: come back and finish up with a little bit. We're
Speaker 1: gonna take a step back and just talk generally about creepiness,
Speaker 1: all right, So I promised that we would talk about creepiness.
Speaker 1: So that's what we'll do. The creeps such a great phrase.
Speaker 1: Everyone says, it gives me the creeps. It's just such
Speaker 1: a just It's one of those phrases that sums things
Speaker 1: up so perfectly. It's livid as a fresh bruise. And um,
Speaker 1: we have Charles Dickens to thank for this, evidently because
Speaker 1: he gets credit for using the creeps. Uh In David
Speaker 1: Copperfield in people had had this feeling before, this sort
Speaker 1: of pleasn't off you know what it feels like to
Speaker 1: get the creeps. But they said things like eel like
Speaker 1: or clammy. Not bad, not bad. But if you said
Speaker 1: that thing makes me feel eel like today, people be like,
Speaker 1: what the heck are you talking about? Right? I think
Speaker 1: also you would use that to describe somebody who gave
Speaker 1: you the creeps as well, like that guy is really clammy,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean? Sure? Well, that means you're
Speaker 1: touching them though, like like Peter Lori would be clammy
Speaker 1: or eel like in some of his characters. You know,
Speaker 1: Peter Lourie, how do you too? Um, So everybody understands
Speaker 1: that there is such thing as the creeps, right, but
Speaker 1: we don't understand why we get the creeps still to
Speaker 1: this day, and again this is important and relates it
Speaker 1: on Canny Valley because another way to put the creeps
Speaker 1: is negative affinity. Remember affinity was the x axis, and
Speaker 1: when the valley dropped down below the x axis, you
Speaker 1: dipped into negative affinity. You dip into the creep the
Speaker 1: creeps exactly right. So you talked about um Ernst yinch Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I get it. It was probably the first person to
Speaker 1: actually sit down and study the creeps or creepiness creepy himself.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think he was just kind of
Speaker 1: a neat thinking man, right, So yinch Man, I like
Speaker 1: saying his name a lot more now. He wrote an
Speaker 1: essay in nineteen o six called on the Psychology of
Speaker 1: the Uncanny and that's the English translation. Um. The German
Speaker 1: word he used, like you said, is unheimlich, Is that right? Um?
Speaker 1: Not unheimlich? Unheimlich Okay, better, thank you? Uh? He he
Speaker 1: used that word, And unheimlich is a variation of the
Speaker 1: word heimlich um, which is not just to say the maneuver,
Speaker 1: It means something else entirely which is homie, we're familiar, right,
Speaker 1: Unheimlich is the opposite of that. It's something strange and foreign,
Speaker 1: and very frequently is translated into uncanny here in the West,
Speaker 1: here here in in England. Yeah, and he he has, uh,
Speaker 1: he thought a lot about this. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that he noted, which I think thought was pretty interesting,
Speaker 1: was that people that he thought were more intellectually discriminating, um,
Speaker 1: are more prone to have these uncanny experiences because they're
Speaker 1: critical thinkers about the world. Right, So, uh that makes sense,
Speaker 1: Like just they pay attention maybe a little more, Yeah,
Speaker 1: or they're curious, like they're they're like, why am I
Speaker 1: creeped out? Let me get to the bottom of this,
Speaker 1: rather than oh I'm creeped out him and then go
Speaker 1: eat the whole thing at chips ahoy and hide under
Speaker 1: the covers. Uh. He He also actually went even further
Speaker 1: and said, it's it's possible that all of humanities knowledge
Speaker 1: has been accrued over these millions of years from the
Speaker 1: the people investigating what'spah this creepiness. It's a pretty weird
Speaker 1: and neat theory of knowledge. Well, yeah, and speaking of theories,
Speaker 1: there are a bunch of theories on creepiness, UM and
Speaker 1: why this happens, and I think they're all pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: The first one is called pathogen avoidance theory, and we
Speaker 1: talked earlier about evolution and UM, this one kind of
Speaker 1: fits into that bucket. Uh. Basically a warning that we
Speaker 1: have evolved to have in our brain. It says that
Speaker 1: person is off, they are diseased. Even you don't want
Speaker 1: to go near them, you want to avoid that pathogen.
Speaker 1: It makes sense. Yeah, it's pretty pretty approachable. Um. There's
Speaker 1: another one that I've seen that I think fairly recent,
Speaker 1: and it's the idea that things give us the creeps when, um,
Speaker 1: when they're trying to nonverbally mimic people and so, like
Speaker 1: a robot doesn't do it, so we're like, oh, that's unsettling.
Speaker 1: Or somebody who you would describe as clammy or eel
Speaker 1: like maybe overdes it a little bit, like they're trying
Speaker 1: to fit in. It's not natural to them and that
Speaker 1: can give you the creep as well. That makes sense,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't really encompass everything. It's definitely not a
Speaker 1: unified theory of creepiness. It just seems to kind of
Speaker 1: inhabit one corner of the creepy spectrum. Yeah, there's another
Speaker 1: one called violation of expectation. Um, this is like, you know,
Speaker 1: you've shaken hands with thousands of people over your life.
Speaker 1: But if you go and you shake a hand and
Speaker 1: you don't know that you're going to get a prosthetic,
Speaker 1: can it may give you the creeps? Uh? And that
Speaker 1: is probably very fleeting because you might just say, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: well it doesn't give me the creeps now, but it's
Speaker 1: just unexpected for me. And actually you said that was fleeting, right, Chuck.
Speaker 1: So I think it was uniche or somebody who said
Speaker 1: that creepiness what gives us the creeps one time might
Speaker 1: not of us the creeps later on, which will kind
Speaker 1: of come into play later. Like Ernst n basically he
Speaker 1: laid the groundwork for the study of creepiness and it
Speaker 1: seems to have gotten a lot of it right right
Speaker 1: out of the gate. Yeah. And like you said, if
Speaker 1: it if it doesn't give you the creeps later, then
Speaker 1: that would fit neatly into the violation of expectation because
Speaker 1: then you can change your expectation right exactly. Yes. Yes,
Speaker 1: another one's mortality salience theory. Yeah, this one, MORI and uh,
Speaker 1: Freud both subscribed to and it basically said that, um,
Speaker 1: we when we encounter like a robot or an automaton
Speaker 1: in Freud's day, um, they remind us of dead people,
Speaker 1: which in turn gets our mind to thinking about how
Speaker 1: we're going to die one day. And so all of
Speaker 1: a sudden we find ourselves in the uncanny valley right,
Speaker 1: which again raises another sorry for the sidetrack, but raises
Speaker 1: another of Unch's points. Um is uncanny nous inherent in
Speaker 1: the object? Or is it inside the observer who's experiencing
Speaker 1: the creeps or uncanny nous? I think it's in the observer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it is, too, which would explain why it
Speaker 1: can go away when you when you come to experience
Speaker 1: it again, like this, when you go through that, when
Speaker 1: you shake the same prosthetic hand again, it's not creepy
Speaker 1: the second time. It might even be interesting, or why
Speaker 1: some people might not experience it at all. Like someone
Speaker 1: might sit there and see a doll and the doll's
Speaker 1: head turns and looks at them, and they're like, neat,
Speaker 1: how much for that doll? Which means you've just met
Speaker 1: a serial killer? And then the dolls creeped out after that, Uh,
Speaker 1: this one, I like the UM even though I can
Speaker 1: never say this word for some reason, and throw po morphism, dehumanization, dichotomy,
Speaker 1: which basically as we attribute these human attributes to the
Speaker 1: robot until we realize that they don't have them. Right. So, like,
Speaker 1: we're looking at this robot that looks like a person.
Speaker 1: We're saying, oh, look, it's just like a human. And
Speaker 1: they're walking and they're talking and they're smiling, and then
Speaker 1: oh god, look at their eyes. Their eyes are dead.
Speaker 1: Look at the eyes. They don't they don't have any
Speaker 1: internal thoughts at all. They're not human. And then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, on Canny Valley, which is a little
Speaker 1: bit about expectation too. I think there's a crossover a little,
Speaker 1: I think, and so creepiness, I think, especially the modern
Speaker 1: incarnation of creepiness. This is my These are my thoughts.
Speaker 1: They seem to be They represent a crossroads right where evolutionarily,
Speaker 1: creepiness I think UM was probably it's alerts us. We're
Speaker 1: on alert when something's creeping us out. We're really focused
Speaker 1: on that thing, right then. But we're also bound by
Speaker 1: society not to just turn and run from anything that
Speaker 1: could conceivably be a threat. You can also take it
Speaker 1: a little further and say that evolutionarily speaking, it would
Speaker 1: not make sense for us to turn and run from
Speaker 1: every single thing that could conceivably be a threat before
Speaker 1: we've identified it as a threat, because we would be
Speaker 1: using up a lot of calories and energy, and we
Speaker 1: would have to find more food than we do. Would
Speaker 1: be inefficient. Right, So we're kind of bound socially to
Speaker 1: stand in place until we identify something as a threat
Speaker 1: or not, in which case, during this period, that's when
Speaker 1: we experience creepiness. Yeah, and I think everyone has experienced this. Um.
Speaker 1: Like you're in a coffee shop or something and like
Speaker 1: some super creepy dude comes in, and if you're liking me,
Speaker 1: you're just like, um, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: keep my eye on that guy. I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna bolt and run, but it might stay near the door. Sure,
Speaker 1: you know, I might get my car keys ready, exactly right. Uh,
Speaker 1: it is, it's this weird social contract, um, And you
Speaker 1: know I feel bad for people that just inherently look
Speaker 1: a little creepy. Well, yeah, let's talk about that. So
Speaker 1: the was these there were these researchers from Knox College
Speaker 1: who did what they build is the first empirical study
Speaker 1: of creepiness. And this is in two thousand sixteen. And um,
Speaker 1: it was an online survey, very little heavy lifting, but
Speaker 1: it was a pretty pretty cool survey. It was in
Speaker 1: four parts, and UM. What they found overall was that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: physical characteristics, physical traits that are almost stereotypically linked to
Speaker 1: creepy people do have an effect. They are creepy. Um,
Speaker 1: as far as as the participants in this study are concerned.
Speaker 1: So the first section said, hey, you know what, what
Speaker 1: is the likelihood that this person is creepy? And there's like,
Speaker 1: you know, descriptions of them with forty four different behaviors. Right. Um.
Speaker 1: And the second part was participants rated the creepiness of
Speaker 1: twenty one different occupations. Um. The third section it said,
Speaker 1: list two hobbies that you think are creepy. They only
Speaker 1: needed to it was open ended to. And then the
Speaker 1: last section, um, the participants said whether or not they
Speaker 1: agreed with fifteen statements about the nature of creepy people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And overall, again like they found like, yes, if you
Speaker 1: have physical traits that people find creepy, like bulging eyes
Speaker 1: or you lick your lips a lot, or you know,
Speaker 1: your you arch your fingers and then just kind of
Speaker 1: tap them together a lot. Okay, it's kind of creepy,
Speaker 1: but the Knox researchers concluded that those aren't creepy necessarily
Speaker 1: in and of themselves. It's when it's in conjunction with
Speaker 1: other creepy behavior that somebody comes across as creepy. Right. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course, the one behavior they put in here
Speaker 1: I think that was probably universally creepy was someone who
Speaker 1: persistently steers the conversation towards a sexual topic, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't, you don't do that. They they also found
Speaker 1: they also found of participants, and this is like, I
Speaker 1: think eight hundred and forty one people of them said
Speaker 1: that men were more likely to be creepy than women.
Speaker 1: I think that's generally true. Um. I don't remember getting
Speaker 1: the creeps a lot in my life by uh, strictly
Speaker 1: from the appearance of a woman, right, but a lot
Speaker 1: of dudes on a weekly basis give me the creeps.
Speaker 1: But we we should say so. There's a website called
Speaker 1: girl dot com g u r l dot com and
Speaker 1: they went on to read it and found a thread
Speaker 1: somewhere that they wrote a blog post about and now
Speaker 1: we're reporting on it, so it's really come full circle.
Speaker 1: But it was a threat about how women can be creepy,
Speaker 1: and it was written by dudes, and um, there are
Speaker 1: some things that apparently are universally creepy among boys with women, right,
Speaker 1: Women that are too needy can be creepy. Women who
Speaker 1: use baby talk too much, or who quote never leave
Speaker 1: a guy alone. Yeah, I just I'm just gonna go
Speaker 1: ahead and dump that right into the trash ben. That's
Speaker 1: my only comment on that. Okay, what about e harmony?
Speaker 1: I mean, if you come home and Glenn closes in
Speaker 1: your kitchen boiling your pet bunny, well, that's a threat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not even creepy. That's just a threat. Although I
Speaker 1: will say in Fatal Attraction, the the scene where she
Speaker 1: is sitting there clicking the light on and off, listening
Speaker 1: to Mad and Butterfly, that was that was kind of creepy.
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of like a creepy woman,
Speaker 1: and I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well, these
Speaker 1: are creepy behaviors, though, you know, not like Glenn cost
Speaker 1: Close walked into the room and you're like, oh, I
Speaker 1: don't know about that, right, right, right, there's a difference
Speaker 1: right there. There's a difference between genuine creepiness and just
Speaker 1: doing creepy things. I think it is much harder for
Speaker 1: women to be creepy than men. Cannot think of a
Speaker 1: single actual creepy woman I'd like to hear from people, though. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: e harmony. So we talked about Reddit. Now we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about e harmony. They had an article where they
Speaker 1: wrote advice to dudes. It was called how to Avoid
Speaker 1: the creep Zone, um, and their advice was for your
Speaker 1: hobbies that you list to be just sort of vanilla,
Speaker 1: don't like and even if you are an amateur taxidermist,
Speaker 1: maybe don't put that down right. They said, it can
Speaker 1: be attractive for a guy to have an off the
Speaker 1: beaten path hobby, and one of the examples they gave
Speaker 1: of an off the beaten path hobby was collecting punk records.
Speaker 1: But don't get weirder than that. Yeah, and if you
Speaker 1: know taxidermy in and of itself, some people might say
Speaker 1: a super creepy. We did an episode on that. Other
Speaker 1: people might say, no, it's just just beautiful artwork. But
Speaker 1: Norman Bates was in a taxidermy for a reason. In
Speaker 1: Psycho it was unsettling. Yeah, you know, yeah, and so
Speaker 1: um there the Knox people who carried out this survey,
Speaker 1: the Knox University researchers, they basically said, here's what we
Speaker 1: think it is. Here's creepiness explained. And what they explained
Speaker 1: was what can be called is the threat ambiguity um theory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this one, I think we kind of put a
Speaker 1: cherry on top on this one. Yeah, we really did
Speaker 1: like it. It's just basically where you are creeped out
Speaker 1: by something because your hackles are raised right then, and
Speaker 1: it's because you haven't determined whether that things a threat
Speaker 1: or not. Right. There's another one though that I subscribe to.
Speaker 1: I think it is finally the unified theory of creepiness.
Speaker 1: I think it covers everything. And it's called the category
Speaker 1: ambiguity theory. Yeah. That was Now did David Livingstone Smith
Speaker 1: make this up or was he just champion this? I
Speaker 1: think he made it up because he wrote about the
Speaker 1: Knox researchers and said, what they're talking about you can
Speaker 1: call threat ambiguity category or threat ambiguity theory with category
Speaker 1: ambiguity theory. He didn't cite anybody else, so it seemed
Speaker 1: to be his own construct. Yeah, so this is the idea.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like the threat ambiguity in that there
Speaker 1: is some confusion, but it's not a threat like I
Speaker 1: think this dude in the coffee shop is gonna kill me.
Speaker 1: It's more like I don't know how to categorize that guy,
Speaker 1: and that freaks me out. And it's based on what's
Speaker 1: called um essential is um right, where if you are
Speaker 1: a member of a species of animal, whether human or
Speaker 1: raccoon or tiger, there's something about you where there's some
Speaker 1: collection or set of things about you that that are
Speaker 1: totally unique to your species. It's something you possess because
Speaker 1: you remember that species, and because you remember that species,
Speaker 1: you possess these things, and it can be very difficult
Speaker 1: to put your finger on it, but it's just one
Speaker 1: of those things that you know when you see it,
Speaker 1: or no, when you don't see it right, and there
Speaker 1: are clear borders between these things. You either have this
Speaker 1: essence fully or you don't have it at all. You're
Speaker 1: lacking and you're missing it and something's really wrong. So
Speaker 1: in this article he used UM the example of a
Speaker 1: wax dummy. Yeah, have you ever been to like Madame
Speaker 1: Tusso's um, I find that the ones and again with
Speaker 1: the eyes, the ones that work the best, or the
Speaker 1: ones where they have sunglasses on. Oh yeah again Michael Jackson,
Speaker 1: that's right. But the whole point with these wax dummies
Speaker 1: with the eyes is they're fixed. They're not moving around.
Speaker 1: The facial expression is locked in. Um, the skin itself.
Speaker 1: You know, you can only do so much. And Madame
Speaker 1: Tussos and museums like that are the best of the best,
Speaker 1: and they do look pretty good. But that's the whole
Speaker 1: point with the Uncanny Valley is you can't get there
Speaker 1: and say we're fine. It's that one per cent that
Speaker 1: still gives people the creeps exactly. And that's and it
Speaker 1: sums up everything, like the threat ambiguity could fall into this,
Speaker 1: whether you're talking about robots, whether you're talking about a
Speaker 1: half dog half lizard combo. Which living stone sites are
Speaker 1: living stones smith sites? Yeah, a dessert would be creepy
Speaker 1: when you saw it, But so things that are a
Speaker 1: threat are creepy. But there's also things that are creepy
Speaker 1: that aren't a threat. And this category ambiguity theory figured
Speaker 1: it out. So if that's true, Chuck and David Livingstone
Speaker 1: Smith figured out what is the basis of creepiness. We
Speaker 1: finally have the independent variable licked and massa hiro Morty's
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley graph and we can get to work. Is
Speaker 1: he still around? Yeah? Yes, when that's happy about all this?
Speaker 1: I get the impression that he's kind of like just whatever,
Speaker 1: gone off on his own little thing, and he's fine.
Speaker 1: He wrote it in v after all, you know, I
Speaker 1: mean most fifty years ago, so he's probably up there.
Speaker 1: Uh you anything else? I got nothing else? Good ones? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley,
Speaker 1: we should say this was based originally on a grabsto article.
Speaker 1: But if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley,
Speaker 1: come read that grab Sto article. You can type Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley and the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: And since I said search bars, time for listener mail. Well,
Speaker 1: and today it's a very special listener mail. This is
Speaker 1: Josh edition because you picked out a very special one.
Speaker 1: I love this one. I'm gonna butcher the dude's name,
Speaker 1: but that's right, take it away. It's a good one. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this one email from a real Irish historian,
Speaker 1: and it feels pretty good to come out of a job.
Speaker 1: Yeah maybe, Okay, Hi guys, I'm a big fan of
Speaker 1: the show. It's informative and insightful, and I find myself
Speaker 1: interested in things that I never looked twice at before.
Speaker 1: One subject that I'd always found fascinating was the correlation
Speaker 1: between the Native American Choctaw tribe and the people of Ireland.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that was a thing that you at all.
Speaker 1: This is a story which isn't well known, okay, which
Speaker 1: isn't well known outside of some areas of Ireland and
Speaker 1: of course within the tribe. But it's a really good
Speaker 1: story of solidarity between two groups of people, despite being
Speaker 1: thousands of miles apart. Less than twenty years after the
Speaker 1: Trail of Tears, which forcibly displaced thousands of natives, the
Speaker 1: Great Famine hit Ireland. During this time, as you know,
Speaker 1: Ireland was colonized by the British and the people of
Speaker 1: Ireland were treated poorly due to the common misconception that
Speaker 1: Irish Catholics were lower caliber of human uh. He goes
Speaker 1: on to to give more examples, but just suffice to
Speaker 1: say it was not good for the Irish people. During
Speaker 1: the famine, words spread to America and to the Choctaw tribe.
Speaker 1: They sympathy eased with the Irish people so much that
Speaker 1: only fifteen years after the Trail of Tears, they donated
Speaker 1: seven hundred and ten dollars during eighteen forty five to
Speaker 1: send to Ireland as part of a relief fund. This
Speaker 1: is estimated to be roughly sixty eight thousand dollars in
Speaker 1: today's money. This was greatly appreciated by the Irish people
Speaker 1: and after the famine the bond continued. In Cork, we
Speaker 1: have a sculpture honoring the tribute of the Choctaw people,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen ninety members of the tribe came to
Speaker 1: Ireland and walked the Famine Walk in Mayo to replicate
Speaker 1: the walk that starving people made to ask the landlord
Speaker 1: for help. In nine in Irish Commemoration group walked from
Speaker 1: Oklahoma to Mission to replicate the Trail of Tears and
Speaker 1: raised seven hundred thousand dollars to help poverty in Africa.
Speaker 1: These two groups continue to work together and to this
Speaker 1: day our President has declared an honorary member of the
Speaker 1: Choctaw tribe. Along with the Quakers, who fed Irish people
Speaker 1: to the point that their members ended starving themselves. The
Speaker 1: Choctaw tribe remained some of the unsung heroes of the
Speaker 1: famine story of Ireland. Sorry it went on so long.
Speaker 1: I'm an Irish historian, so I tend to waffle. Love
Speaker 1: the show. Best of luck with yourselves, Uh, Roison kill
Speaker 1: Roy fan, fantastic, great story. Thanks a lot, Roison. I'm
Speaker 1: quite sure that's not the actual pronunciation of your name,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of accent marks over letters there
Speaker 1: normally aren't. Um, So I apologized for that, but I
Speaker 1: nailed your last name. I'm positive of it. And Josh
Speaker 1: Clark three and a half stars, not bad out of
Speaker 1: three and a half? Right, remember what was star search
Speaker 1: the four stars? Oh? I don't remember. I just just
Speaker 1: now remember there was such thing as Starson. Uh. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: well you take the in part, Chuck, since I took
Speaker 1: listener mail. Oh geez uh, thanks for listening. Um Hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with us, you
Speaker 1: can find Josh at josh um Clark on Twitter and
Speaker 1: me uh in Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant, or
Speaker 1: you can go to our official pages. Stuff you should know, podcasts,
Speaker 1: what else? Uh, let's see if they want to send
Speaker 1: us an email. Oh yeah, email us at stuff podcast
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com and have a good day.
Speaker 1: Is that what you say? That's good enough? All right?
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
Speaker 1: it how stuff works dot com.