Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it is
Speaker 1: time to enter the vault. Because it is Saturday, time
Speaker 1: to go into the archives for an old episode of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This time we wanted to
Speaker 1: revisit our original exploration of the Uncanny Valley. This was
Speaker 1: a two part episode U Part one was originally published
Speaker 1: April four. I think back on this episode a good bid. Actually,
Speaker 1: I guess I encounter a lot of strange almost their
Speaker 1: simulations of the human likeness. Yeah, yeah, this one, this
Speaker 1: one is one that that I think back to a
Speaker 1: lot as well, just because, yeah, you're always encountering some
Speaker 1: imperfect digital recreations of a human likeness, and then we
Speaker 1: have to sort out how we feel about it, but
Speaker 1: also how we've perhaps been conditioned to feel about it
Speaker 1: just by knowing about, uh, the idea of the Uncanny Valley.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this is gonna first of two episodes of
Speaker 1: this episode is Into the Uncanny Valley, originally published April four,
Speaker 1: and then in the subsequent episode, we're going to go
Speaker 1: Beyond the Uncanny Valley. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind from how stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I want to take
Speaker 1: you back to a conversation we had. I think it
Speaker 1: was last December. It was right after I went to
Speaker 1: see the new, the most recent Star Wars movie, Rogue one.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, uh, And I am on the cusp, the
Speaker 1: very cusp of seeing it myself and waiting for it
Speaker 1: to become rent rental options. So oh it's not yet.
Speaker 1: Still got still a week or two out. So has
Speaker 1: everything been spoiled for you so far? No? People have
Speaker 1: been a little um cooler on this one. Um. I
Speaker 1: think some things are probably spoiled for me, but not
Speaker 1: like that last one where every just really felt the
Speaker 1: need to, you know, just lay it all out on
Speaker 1: social media. Let me let me spoil one thing for
Speaker 1: you here and they go to space and there's a
Speaker 1: war there. Yeah, stars among the stars. But there is
Speaker 1: one thing in the movie. Okay, so mild spoiler for
Speaker 1: Rogue one coming out. It's something that probably everybody already knows.
Speaker 1: It's also not really about the content of the movie,
Speaker 1: but just about which characters you see. But if you
Speaker 1: are ready, are you ready for the mild spoiler? Okay,
Speaker 1: we get to see if you remember back to the
Speaker 1: original Star Wars. Back go back to the seventies. Peter
Speaker 1: Cushing as Grand mof Tarkin, the guy who was in
Speaker 1: fact Darth Vader's boss on the Star Him. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: enough of this, Vada release him. And we love Peter
Speaker 1: Cushing because he was in all these old monster movies.
Speaker 1: He goes back to the Hammer movies. He was. He
Speaker 1: was Dr Frankenstein, like the villainous Dr Frankenstein of the
Speaker 1: Hammer films. And he I think was the hero of
Speaker 1: the version of the Mummy that has Christopher Lee as
Speaker 1: as the Mummy. Uh, the one. I've got the poster
Speaker 1: for it in the House six up. It's the Belgian posters,
Speaker 1: so it's La Malediction de Feron. But yeah, so Peter
Speaker 1: Cushing was the original Grand mof Tarkan, this bad Empire
Speaker 1: guy who was Darth Vader's boss. And the thing they
Speaker 1: do in the New Rogue One is they bring him back.
Speaker 1: He's dead, he has passed away. This movie takes place
Speaker 1: a little bit before the original Star Wars is supposed
Speaker 1: to have taken place. But they bring this character back
Speaker 1: and they have an actor stand in as him, but
Speaker 1: it's not just a recast role. They try to make
Speaker 1: it look as if this is Peter Cushing standing here
Speaker 1: delivering the lines with c g I. And this is
Speaker 1: an odd choice because all right, so you're gonna have
Speaker 1: Darth Vader in there, that's easy to do. Darth Vader
Speaker 1: is a dude in a suit, voiced by James Earl Jones.
Speaker 1: James Earl Jones is still alive, so you can check
Speaker 1: that one off the list. But Grandma Tarkin, like you said, uh,
Speaker 1: the actor is dead. So it seems to me like
Speaker 1: the first easiest thing to do is just don't have
Speaker 1: those scenes. If you know it's going to be ablematic,
Speaker 1: don't even mess with it. Or um, just use an
Speaker 1: actual living actor such as Wayne Pigram who played him
Speaker 1: in Revenge of the Sith. Or go with Ben Cross,
Speaker 1: who's another actor that I've seen over the years brought
Speaker 1: up as potential Tarkan casting, or head go with Ralph Finds, Like,
Speaker 1: clearly you have the money to throw down the well
Speaker 1: of expensive c g I equipment, Just go ahead and
Speaker 1: hire Ralph Finds. I know he's pricey, but he's great
Speaker 1: and it's consummate evil Brett. Yeah, he even kind of
Speaker 1: looks like a younger Peter Cushing. He's got that same
Speaker 1: kind of angular face, like the thin long face with
Speaker 1: the jaw and the scowl. It's all there. And it's
Speaker 1: not like fans of various franchise are not clearly cool
Speaker 1: with recasting. It's not like we're gonna be thrown into,
Speaker 1: you know, a traumatic spin, because you can look to
Speaker 1: a Game of Thrones, James Bond, Twilight, Harry Potter, etcetera,
Speaker 1: like we we get it. We can roll with a recast. Now.
Speaker 1: I want to go into completely different directions thinking about
Speaker 1: this c g I grandmof Tarken. One is that I
Speaker 1: didn't like it in the movie. Okay, I saw it
Speaker 1: and I was just like, I don't want this. It
Speaker 1: pulled me out of the movie. It made me stop
Speaker 1: being in the story and just thinking about how did
Speaker 1: they do that? I don't On one hand, it looked
Speaker 1: great like when you see the movie, I think he
Speaker 1: will kind of have to agree. It's unless I'm missing something.
Speaker 1: It's the best c g I simulation of a real
Speaker 1: person that I've ever seen. Like it looks amazing, but
Speaker 1: it still looks not quite good enough that I can
Speaker 1: just accept it and go with it. I kept continually thinking, like,
Speaker 1: what am I looking at? It's almost really him, but
Speaker 1: it's not quite really him, and it made me feel icky.
Speaker 1: So in this it made you to send into what
Speaker 1: we've come to know as a as a as a
Speaker 1: species as the Uncanny Valley. Right, So today is going
Speaker 1: to be the first of two episodes we want to
Speaker 1: do about the Uncanny Valley, and this first one we
Speaker 1: wanted to descend into the Uncanny Valley, but not us
Speaker 1: talk about it in terms of the standard pop culture phenomenon,
Speaker 1: because this is one of those side tech concepts that
Speaker 1: is totally filtered down into the mainstream. Everybody talks about
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley. It's a totally normal, ground level pop
Speaker 1: culture phenomenon now, especially with as much bad C. G
Speaker 1: I as we encounter in the movies. But there it's
Speaker 1: also a scientific field of study. It's something that people
Speaker 1: are looking into with empirical research to try to figure
Speaker 1: out does it really exist, If it does really exist,
Speaker 1: what causes it, what can be done about it. So
Speaker 1: we want to look at it from both of these
Speaker 1: angles today, Right, so we should probably roll through some
Speaker 1: just fun examples of this. We're gonna try and not
Speaker 1: to go too long on this. If we do, we'll
Speaker 1: cut it and save it for trailer talk. Either way,
Speaker 1: we'll probably do a Facebook live trailer talk on an
Speaker 1: upcoming Friday about some of these movies. Okay, so I
Speaker 1: want to go back to a much earlier experience for me, Robert,
Speaker 1: did you see The Mummy Returns in two thousand one?
Speaker 1: Remember this one? I don't think I saw The Mummy Returns.
Speaker 1: I saw the Money and I remember digging it at
Speaker 1: the time, but not not the old hammer one or
Speaker 1: the universal one. You know, the Yeah, the the re
Speaker 1: the reboot of the Money. Is his name, Brendan Fraser. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what Arnold Vosslo? Yeah he was he. I I
Speaker 1: enjoyed him as they kind of brought in some of
Speaker 1: these aspects of the 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 Scorpion, 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 seem 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: in a sense, maybe that hasn't gone away. We're still
Speaker 1: very the Rogue one example, Like, clearly everyone was very
Speaker 1: optimistic about how great this looked, and even though to
Speaker 1: your point, it does look great, but within the context
Speaker 1: of the film, something doesn't quite work. Yeah, I would say,
Speaker 1: now for some people we can get into this more.
Speaker 1: I think, especially in the next episode when we then
Speaker 1: the next one, we want to try to go beyond
Speaker 1: the valley, the Uncanny Valley. But I will say at
Speaker 1: this point, for some people, Tarkan was not over the
Speaker 1: line or under the line. I don't know where you
Speaker 1: put the line. But for for some people it worked,
Speaker 1: and I do think that's an interesting thing to acknowledge
Speaker 1: that while for me I I experience this, uh, not
Speaker 1: to the same extent as the Scorpion King, but a
Speaker 1: kind of Scorpion King revulsion, not everybody did. Now, one
Speaker 1: thing about Tarkan is that the Tarkan c Jack character
Speaker 1: is correct me if I'm wrong, because I have not
Speaker 1: seen it myself yet. But he is interacting with human
Speaker 1: actors in this in his scenes, Yeah, I think, so okay,
Speaker 1: or at least he's in a film with other human actors,
Speaker 1: even if he's not sharing the exact same scene with them.
Speaker 1: So you might think, well, if you just had a
Speaker 1: movie just full of brilliant looking Tarkins, maybe it would
Speaker 1: be okay. And maybe it would But some of the
Speaker 1: classic examples of Uncanny Valley happened to be films that
Speaker 1: are filled with nothing but c g I characters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how about one from the same year as The mom
Speaker 1: of Your Turns two thousand one, if you go back
Speaker 1: to Oh yes, Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, I remember
Speaker 1: kind of liking it. I do too. It was a
Speaker 1: film that I think I kind of half watched, half
Speaker 1: worked on, like some just college course workers something. It
Speaker 1: was just on in the background and and maybe that
Speaker 1: was the right level of immersion in it. But I
Speaker 1: remember digging it. But at the same time, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of dead puppet eyes in this movie. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's so I saw it at the time. I
Speaker 1: remember having mixed feelings about the animation, like in some senses,
Speaker 1: I remember thinking, Wow, that looks so cool. That again
Speaker 1: may have been a product of its time. We can
Speaker 1: talk about that more, how our expectations changes things go on.
Speaker 1: But also I don't know. There were multiple things wrong
Speaker 1: with that movie, one of which being that the last
Speaker 1: line of spoken dialogue in the movie, as a friend
Speaker 1: of mine pointed out at the time, was oh it's warm.
Speaker 1: Well I can I don't remember the line, so I
Speaker 1: can't speak to it how well it landed, But I
Speaker 1: can see that being a problem. Role credits Now. Another
Speaker 1: 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: nightmare 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 feature length motion picture, that's
Speaker 1: very difficult to do. In fact, I'm really grasping for
Speaker 1: an example where anybody actually pulled it off. Like, the
Speaker 1: best adaptations of children's books that come to mind are
Speaker 1: all very short, very short films. Generally, I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: Dr Seus's adaptations from the seventies and eighties, not The
Speaker 1: Polar Express, which is just an exercise in psychic trauma
Speaker 1: 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 seven's Bayowolf. 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 Bao Wolf could
Speaker 1: make 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 potential in the world.
Speaker 1: And they had a pretty cool vocal cast as well,
Speaker 1: I think, and Angelina Jolie is in it as the
Speaker 1: monster's mother. They have ray Winstone as Bowel. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: does the voice of of Beowulf, and uh and who
Speaker 1: was it that plays the monster? We were just Crispin
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 valleys 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, you know, here's here's the thing here.
Speaker 1: I have to say that I haven't noticed it as
Speaker 1: often these days. I think a lot of game animators
Speaker 1: have found ways to get around the Uncanny Valley. I
Speaker 1: 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 you when
Speaker 1: you look at a video game character, you would never
Speaker 1: mistake it for a photograph of a person, even even
Speaker 1: one that's got really good graphics. But much like the
Speaker 1: way dialogue is written in films, you know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to make dialogue sound like real people talk, because
Speaker 1: that would be horrible to listen to, but you do
Speaker 1: want to make it sound quote realistic. You don't want
Speaker 1: to make your characters look too realistic in animation, but
Speaker 1: you do want to make them look quote realistic. In
Speaker 1: other words, they feel real. Yeah, this reminds me of
Speaker 1: a game franchise that I haven't I don't think I've
Speaker 1: ever played more than a demo of this, but the
Speaker 1: Gears of War series. So all the people in this
Speaker 1: kind of look like like, if you're gonna be critical
Speaker 1: of it, you might say, well, everyone looks kind of
Speaker 1: like they're weird guerilla people. Like. It was a like
Speaker 1: we're in an alternate world where unrealistically huge upper bodies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: is if evolution took a slightly different turn into an
Speaker 1: intelligent primates. Uh. And yet they look real. They don't
Speaker 1: look like they don't get an uncanny effect rolling off them,
Speaker 1: Like you know, you look at them, you can see pores,
Speaker 1: you can see hair follicills. They look real, but they
Speaker 1: are but they are certainly not going for authentic human
Speaker 1: being there all right, Now, I want to put out
Speaker 1: one more example here before we move on, and it's
Speaker 1: a rare example of uncanny valley avoidance, a very specific
Speaker 1: type of uncanny valley avoidance, and that is from a
Speaker 1: fantastic stop motion short that was produced by the National
Speaker 1: Film Board of Canada. And you can find the online
Speaker 1: if you just do us a search for it. It's
Speaker 1: Madam Tutley Putly and it's a wonderful little little film,
Speaker 1: very 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 a way, either. They videotaped the eyes of human
Speaker 1: actors 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 think that
Speaker 1: it's super creepy. I found it to be like this,
Speaker 1: this interesting example of circumventing the Uncanny Alley. 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, we will get into
Speaker 1: the origin of the scientific idea of the Uncanny Valley
Speaker 1: and its history. And research. All right, we're back. So
Speaker 1: the uncanny Valley. Where does this even come from? Right?
Speaker 1: So we've already been talking about it because most people
Speaker 1: have heard of this, they're somewhat familiar with it. I
Speaker 1: was talking to Rachel about it though. She was saying,
Speaker 1: you know, at least to her, it had this connotation
Speaker 1: of just generally synthetically generated images being creepy in one
Speaker 1: way or another. So maybe we should get into the
Speaker 1: specifics of the origin of the idea. So let's go
Speaker 1: back to the year nineteen seventy. Everything's great, Wait is it?
Speaker 1: I don't know, but but everybody, everybody's looking forward to
Speaker 1: the future in terms of creating humanoid robots. What are
Speaker 1: we going to be able to do well? The Japanese
Speaker 1: roboticist massa Hiro Mori of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Speaker 1: He wrote a paper that was published in this Japanese
Speaker 1: journal Energy that coined the term uncanny Valley to describe
Speaker 1: a problem that he was predicting with increasingly humanoid robots.
Speaker 1: And this was based on just some observations he'd had
Speaker 1: of of different events. So you might say incidents in
Speaker 1: the progress of designing humanoid robots such as consumer electronics
Speaker 1: shows in Japan and stuff like that. So what he
Speaker 1: predicted was that as you had a humanoid robot, robot
Speaker 1: that looks like a human and it's likeness to a
Speaker 1: human increased, our attitude toward them would improve. Our affinity
Speaker 1: would go up as they became more human, until they
Speaker 1: reached a certain tipping point of similarity to humans, where
Speaker 1: suddenly our affinity, our friendly attitude, almost immediately shifts and
Speaker 1: plunges down into strong revulsion. Being human is likable, being
Speaker 1: sort of human is likable, but being almost human is
Speaker 1: horrible and repulsive. And then of course at the final end,
Speaker 1: uh you you would have a real human. So you
Speaker 1: can think of the uncanny valley as a phase in
Speaker 1: a graph, an X Y graph, and along the horizontal
Speaker 1: axis on the bottom, you've got the degree of similarity
Speaker 1: to a human, and then on the vertical axis you've
Speaker 1: got the degree of our affinity for the object. And
Speaker 1: more hypothesized, this graph would have these two peaks. You'd
Speaker 1: start with zero on both axes, because a thing that
Speaker 1: has no human like traits basically gets no human affinity
Speaker 1: response one way or another. And we just don't you know,
Speaker 1: how much do you really like an industrial conveyor belt
Speaker 1: that you're just sort of neutral on it. But as
Speaker 1: you increase the humanity, you give a robot arms or
Speaker 1: something that looks like a face, eyes, limbs, you climb
Speaker 1: this gentle, gradual slope to the fur peak and affinity. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and he didn't name the peak, but I
Speaker 1: think we should name the peak. I think this first
Speaker 1: peak should be called something like the cuteness peak. That's
Speaker 1: not exactly right because it's not exactly cuteness, but it's
Speaker 1: 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 eye. 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. In fact,
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 are just
Speaker 1: kind of have general, very basic faces that don't try
Speaker 1: to have human skin or anything like that that just
Speaker 1: might 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 peap. But at a certain point after this
Speaker 1: first peak, this graph drops off steeply. So you keep
Speaker 1: going along the x axis, but then the y axis
Speaker 1: drops off, not just down to zero, but far below zero,
Speaker 1: into the negative affinity range. And this part of the
Speaker 1: graph is the uncanny valley. As the similarity to a
Speaker 1: real 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 bananas, I think, so like like great candy, like
Speaker 1: grape candy doesn't really taste like grapes, but it's if
Speaker 1: it's enough from the Uncanny Valley of Candy the year
Speaker 1: You're okay, whoa, You're right, banana candy actually does taste
Speaker 1: like bananas in a way that makes it not really good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I've candy fans, I don't eat that much candy anymore.
Speaker 1: So maybe the technology has advanced, but uh, my memory
Speaker 1: of the banana candy is is that of an uncanny experience. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing we should note is that so this original
Speaker 1: paper was published in nineteen seventy twelve. English translation was
Speaker 1: published in uh the I Triple A Robotics and Automation magazine.
Speaker 1: And that's what I was using, is my reference, that
Speaker 1: English translation from twelve. Uh. And so it has some
Speaker 1: graphs here, It has Mori's original graphs or interpretations of them,
Speaker 1: and we can get into a little more detail on
Speaker 1: the nuances of Morey's theory. But one thing I did
Speaker 1: read was that many years later somebody contacted more and
Speaker 1: he and they were talking to him about this idea
Speaker 1: he had of the uncanny valley, and they were like, well,
Speaker 1: does does anything lie beyond the peak of reality? And
Speaker 1: he said, hey, oh yeah, actually there is such a thing.
Speaker 1: And he said, you know, beyond the real human, you'd
Speaker 1: have sort of like artistic ideals. Oh wow, like the
Speaker 1: realm of forms even right, Yeah, so well, I think
Speaker 1: he used an example of like a statue of Buddha,
Speaker 1: you know, a beautiful, perfect statue of Buddha. It's almost
Speaker 1: like it we have greater affinity for it than we
Speaker 1: have for a realistic human because we've been, well, to
Speaker 1: a large point, we've been conditioned to rite. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: that kind of gets into this, this idea of conditioned
Speaker 1: familiarity that we not only have with religious icons, but
Speaker 1: also with pop culture icons. So not only the Buddha,
Speaker 1: but also Robbie the robot, or or even the Terminator
Speaker 1: or well, yeah, that does make me think that in
Speaker 1: some ways, if if aesthetic ideals and things that were
Speaker 1: familiar with through our culture might be even beyond humans.
Speaker 1: I mean, again, this is not like rigorous research, This
Speaker 1: is just what more he says, he inks and predicts. Uh,
Speaker 1: could could there be like a robot that we really
Speaker 1: love that's actually better than a than a normal human? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a study that came out last year,
Speaker 1: I believe from Penn State University that was kind of
Speaker 1: interesting alone in these lines. So The researchers survey three
Speaker 1: seven nine adults ages ages sixty to eighty six, and
Speaker 1: they asked them for specific memories of robot films they'd
Speaker 1: seen in their general attitudes towards robots and and the
Speaker 1: you know the age here. As you might imagine, they're
Speaker 1: really looking at at potential care robots, like the idea
Speaker 1: of like, what kind of robots should help you use
Speaker 1: the bathroom? Do you want something that looks like kind
Speaker 1: of like a person, or do you want something that
Speaker 1: looks like a forklift with a forklift mated with an
Speaker 1: easy chair. But if you look at the ages used
Speaker 1: here and twenty sixteen, when the studies took place, you
Speaker 1: can say that these people grew up with science fiction.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean they might not have personally consumed
Speaker 1: a lot of it, but it's in the culture, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: They they definitely had access to it. And researchers found
Speaker 1: that individuals who could recall more cinematic robot portrayals were
Speaker 1: increasingly likely to hold positive attitudes towards robots in general.
Speaker 1: So it didn't matter if they remembered murderous kill bots
Speaker 1: or well meaning helper bots. Uh. They the mere memory
Speaker 1: of multiple robotic portrayals correlated to pro robot vibes, so
Speaker 1: the study findings. They also backed up the importance of
Speaker 1: human looking human esque robots to invoke a sympathetic user response.
Speaker 1: But the researchers stressed that robot designers might want to
Speaker 1: incorporate robotic features that older adults will remember from their
Speaker 1: cinematic past. So it's saying that, like, don't just try
Speaker 1: to make it like a human. Try to make it
Speaker 1: like the robots we have known and loved. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: make it fun. You know, if I'm if I need
Speaker 1: a robot to help me go to the bathroom, make
Speaker 1: it make make them the robots from Silent Running, you know,
Speaker 1: Hulie Do and Louie, the little little guys. Then at
Speaker 1: least I can engage my nostalgia a little bit totally.
Speaker 1: So I want to look at a few more nuances.
Speaker 1: Maury's original paper in nineteen seventy so one thing, I
Speaker 1: do think it's very interesting and I want to come
Speaker 1: back to as we explore this topic more. More hypothesizes
Speaker 1: in the original paper that our perception of an uncanny
Speaker 1: valley might depend on the context in which we're we're
Speaker 1: viewing the being and the example he gives here is
Speaker 1: he's talking about Buon Rocku 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 and rocky 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: the Uncanny Valley, because there are a lot of people
Speaker 1: that there are a lot of people who have kind
Speaker 1: of um an irrational version to puppets in general, and
Speaker 1: certainly if you take just a still puppet and you
Speaker 1: hold it up. There are various puppets that one might
Speaker 1: find a little bit uncanny or creepy, etcetera. But in
Speaker 1: the process of performing with a talented performer is going
Speaker 1: 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 its situations where the
Speaker 1: puppeteer is visible and puppet situations where puppeteers not. You know,
Speaker 1: so you have your basic the muppet situation where you
Speaker 1: don't see the puppeteers, but there are plenty of art
Speaker 1: forms of puppetry performance styles in which the puppeteers very visible,
Speaker 1: either completely or just their face. You see their eyes,
Speaker 1: You see that there's a person involved here, and uh,
Speaker 1: and there's not this this mystery or this sense of deception, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think conceptual clues like that are very important. Also
Speaker 1: is when you consider the the idea of going to
Speaker 1: a puppet theater, it also includes a certain attitude charging
Speaker 1: effect in the audience, Like an an audience member goes
Speaker 1: to a puppet theater prepared to suspend their disbelief, like
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like you put yourself in
Speaker 1: an intentional state of open mindedness about what you're viewing,
Speaker 1: and you give yourself an interpretive framework through which to Like,
Speaker 1: if you were not prepared to watch a puppet theater
Speaker 1: story and suddenly a puppet was just moving around, that
Speaker 1: might be a lot creepier. Yeah, I agree. So part
Speaker 1: of the Uncanny Valley effect is probably also in the
Speaker 1: viewer themselves and in the so the context is not
Speaker 1: just where you are, what's going on with what you're
Speaker 1: looking at, but what you're expecting to see. Now, one
Speaker 1: more thing that Morey points out is he thinks that
Speaker 1: they're going to be very different rules governing the Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley for still objects versus moving objects. And essentially his
Speaker 1: hypothesis is that movement is going to amplify both the
Speaker 1: peaks and the valleys of the graph. So if you
Speaker 1: imagine the graph we said earlier, gentle slope up to
Speaker 1: first peak, you know, kind of cute whatever has some
Speaker 1: human characteristics, then a dip down into too close to
Speaker 1: human but not there, and then a final rise up
Speaker 1: 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. So a thing that is
Speaker 1: moving gets greater affinity if it's good if it's at
Speaker 1: one of these two peaks, but it's even more revolting
Speaker 1: and unpleasant if it's at the valley. Uh So, this
Speaker 1: this makes me think of Samara in The Ring, those
Speaker 1: scenes where Samara is emerging from the TV or the well,
Speaker 1: her movement is is jerky and and I understand that
Speaker 1: they created that effect by having the actor or actress
Speaker 1: walk backwards and then reversing the footage. So you have this,
Speaker 1: you have this this movement that is, you know, natural,
Speaker 1: but being reversed it it feels very unnatural and it's
Speaker 1: hard to really pinpoint what's not working for you about it. Right.
Speaker 1: So More in the end concludes he gives this recommendation
Speaker 1: based on his hypothesis. He says, don't go for realism, right,
Speaker 1: It's gonna be so hard if you're designing a humanoid robot. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot of what we're we're talking about in these
Speaker 1: episodes is animation. He's talking primarily about humanoid robots. But
Speaker 1: typically these uh two fields get somewhat conflated in discussion
Speaker 1: of the Uncanny Valley because in both cases you're trying
Speaker 1: to create something that looks pleasingly human. Um. He wrote,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be so hard to get out of the
Speaker 1: valley up the second peak, that that's the reality peak
Speaker 1: is so steep. Instead, roboticists should not try, and instead
Speaker 1: they 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
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 edge of this physical valley and
Speaker 1: there's a local guide. They're saying, don't do it. Don't
Speaker 1: do it, the value will consume you. And they're like, no,
Speaker 1: you're Lucasfilm. We can do it. Yeah, we got all
Speaker 1: this high text gear. There's no way that anything's going
Speaker 1: to take us down there. And then they go down
Speaker 1: there and it's just Jurassic Park or Congo with they
Speaker 1: just get torn apart. You know, I do. I do
Speaker 1: think the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park come out of the
Speaker 1: uncanny valley for dinosaurs. They do. Yeah, And that introduces
Speaker 1: an interesting wrinkle in that, like Maury is talking about
Speaker 1: human wide qualities, it would probably be a related but
Speaker 1: different thing to just say animal reality versus specifically human reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean when for non human creatures, certainly we've
Speaker 1: been able to nail that. For ages, to stop motion creatures, often,
Speaker 1: even if their movements are kind of herky jerky, they
Speaker 1: feel great. Um that heard of stop motion robots in
Speaker 1: older films, so that I've never had a problem buying
Speaker 1: into them. And yeah, you're look into the eye of
Speaker 1: the track or the t rex or the velociraptor and
Speaker 1: you never doubt for a second. Yeah. But so one
Speaker 1: thing I think we should point out is that as
Speaker 1: prescient as Mori was of what would become this widely
Speaker 1: recognized pop culture phenomenon his paper, it's not it's not
Speaker 1: 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 don't like it.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't necessarily mean that the uncanny Valley, as
Speaker 1: described by more 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, et cetera. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of factors to contemplate here, Like for
Speaker 1: my own part, I've always found it interesting and I
Speaker 1: definitely think there's something to it. However, you line it
Speaker 1: up with similar cases in life, such as say, individuals
Speaker 1: that 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, and then you
Speaker 1: know a lazy eye, or or you know some sort
Speaker 1: of cleft lip or cleft palate scenario, or it just
Speaker 1: might be like their faces maybe not all that symmetrical, right,
Speaker 1: and you know nobody whose face is perfectly symmetrical. But
Speaker 1: with all of these individuals, you interact with them, you
Speaker 1: get to know them maybe, and whatever kind of like
Speaker 1: initial um reaction is present, be it just kind of
Speaker 1: a huh or that goes away, and you can unless
Speaker 1: you're a total jerk, Unless you're a total jerk, or
Speaker 1: you're gonna be able to relate to that person. You're
Speaker 1: gonna be able to communicate with that person, and you're
Speaker 1: not going to be thrown for a curve every time
Speaker 1: they make eye contact with you. Yeah, I would agree
Speaker 1: with that. So there is certainly, like in Maury's original formulation,
Speaker 1: he he would, I think, put different kinds of um
Speaker 1: physical abnormality somewhere on the ascending slope, on the on
Speaker 1: the on the uncanny valley slope. So you have a normal,
Speaker 1: healthy human up at the peak, I guess somewhere below
Speaker 1: the artistic ideal of the great Buddhist statue or something.
Speaker 1: But you'd have normal, healthy human. Then somewhere below them
Speaker 1: would be people who have who look like there is
Speaker 1: something wrong with them in terms of having uh, you know,
Speaker 1: perfect health and symmetricality. I mean, certainly because just an
Speaker 1: ill person. You encounter someone who is clearly a little
Speaker 1: bit sick or a little bit hungover or whatever you
Speaker 1: can tell, and it causes a light to go off
Speaker 1: in your head. Yeah. Uh, And and yet we can
Speaker 1: quite easily adapt to people like, you know, you see
Speaker 1: somebody like that, it is you just know it is
Speaker 1: not proper to react to somebody with revulsion. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: like right now in Atlanta as we're recording, this pollen
Speaker 1: is everywhere. So there are several people in my life.
Speaker 1: I'm not really affected by the pollen so much, but
Speaker 1: it totally debilitates some of my coworkers, some of my
Speaker 1: friends and red face puffy eyes. Yeah, and and sometimes
Speaker 1: they're like walked out on allergy medication to boot and
Speaker 1: you just get you just you know, you accept it.
Speaker 1: You realize, oh, well, you know, my my friend here
Speaker 1: is going to be kind of a pollen zombie for
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks. But that doesn't mean we can't
Speaker 1: hang out. It doesn't mean we can't work on this
Speaker 1: or that. Yeah, so definitely, The Uncanny Valley has plenty
Speaker 1: of critics, and plenty I think a very fair criticisms
Speaker 1: leveled at it. I just want to go back to
Speaker 1: one popular article. I came across a two thousand ten
Speaker 1: article in Popular Mechanics by Eric Softge where he sort
Speaker 1: of points out that at the time people were as
Speaker 1: I think they are still now treating the Uncanny Valley
Speaker 1: as a proven fact, but in fact, at the time,
Speaker 1: he says, you know, there's really almost no convincing evidence
Speaker 1: that such a thing even exists, and he speaks to
Speaker 1: an expert named Carl McDorman, director of the Android Science
Speaker 1: Center at Indiana University, and McDorman, who has conducted research
Speaker 1: on the valley, offered his opinion in the article, saying, quote,
Speaker 1: it turns out that there may be more than one
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley. It's not the overall degree of human likeness
Speaker 1: that makes a robot or animated care acter uncanny. It's
Speaker 1: more a matter of mismatch. If you have an extremely
Speaker 1: realistic skin texture but at the same time cartoonish eyes
Speaker 1: or realistic eyes and an unrealistic skin texture, that's very uncanny,
Speaker 1: uh and the art. So that's an idea about the
Speaker 1: perceptual mismatch that I do want to revisit later in
Speaker 1: this episode. But the article also speaks to a guy
Speaker 1: named David Hanson who's a roboticist who specifically specializes in
Speaker 1: creating very realistic humanoid robots. I think he did that
Speaker 1: that Einstein head thing. Oh yeah, nothing. So Hansen claims
Speaker 1: that even if people find overly realistic robots creepy at first,
Speaker 1: they get used to them within minutes. This is sort
Speaker 1: of what you were just talking about. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: you become acclimated even to something that you might uh,
Speaker 1: at some kind of base level, have a negative reaction to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I keep thinking of having an isolation in this because
Speaker 1: it's the game I'm currently playing, and uh and I
Speaker 1: feel like that the c G characters are are a
Speaker 1: pretty well done in there. I haven't felt that the
Speaker 1: tinge of of Uncanny Valley washing over me. Some of
Speaker 1: the voice actings a little weak. But but but speaking
Speaker 1: of the voice, like the the the androids you encounter
Speaker 1: though with the sex and uh androids that key. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and when I first on Canny Valley, well, yeah, but
Speaker 1: when I first encountered them, yeah, they had the uncanny
Speaker 1: intentionally kind of creepy appearance and the very creepy robot voice.
Speaker 1: But yet when they were not actively attacking me, I
Speaker 1: kind of was. I was kind of cool with it.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until he started becoming violent that that that
Speaker 1: the mere sound of their voice or the appearance of
Speaker 1: one uh down there, you know, in the distance down
Speaker 1: the Hallway would would cause my nerves to react. I mean,
Speaker 1: those things are funny, they're uh, they're a good part
Speaker 1: of that game. But anyway, So in this UH article,
Speaker 1: the author also cites some other unnamed robots roboticists, as
Speaker 1: well as his own experience when he's talking about meeting
Speaker 1: robots that he had previously seen on video, and one
Speaker 1: thing he says is, you know, an Uncanny Valley effect
Speaker 1: that was present when I saw a video of this
Speaker 1: robot went away when I saw it in person. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's generally true of people. He claims
Speaker 1: it's true. But even if this is truly the case
Speaker 1: for robots, I'm not sure how it would apply to animations.
Speaker 1: Probably wouldn't apply to animations. Um, But I think that
Speaker 1: there are some good threads to start tugging at here,
Speaker 1: because it's probably the case that there are more dimensions
Speaker 1: to the Uncanny Valley than more he imagined in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: meaning more than just that X axis of um closeness
Speaker 1: to realistic human appearance versus distance from realistic human appearance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, just 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, first one here that I came across
Speaker 1: was a two thousand nine Princeton University study and they
Speaker 1: looked into the effects of uncanny value of the Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley on maccaque monkeys, so so non human subjects. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because that that makes sense, right if Yeah, 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 lawnmower man. They kind
Speaker 1: of asking if I've seen lawnmower man, Robert, you know
Speaker 1: I've seen lawnmower man. Yes, so yeah, I think lawn
Speaker 1: more man. Uh, and you kind of have an idea
Speaker 1: that that level of computer animation, and the monkeys did
Speaker 1: not want any part of it. They averted their eyes,
Speaker 1: they acted frightened when confronted with lawnmower man monkey. So
Speaker 1: it's not much, I admit, but it's a little experimental
Speaker 1: evidence for the argument that Uncanny Valley is an evolutionary response. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you can observe it in monkeys, there's probably
Speaker 1: some element of it that that is biological in the brain.
Speaker 1: It's instinctual and and not just something we've all learned
Speaker 1: to say about weirdly looking animated characters and robots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that would be maybe a weak piece of evidence,
Speaker 1: but still a piece of evidence you could put in
Speaker 1: the column of saying there is something there. The valley
Speaker 1: does to some extent exist. Right now, the next study
Speaker 1: that I ran across this comes back this to one
Speaker 1: of the graphics that you pulled out of the believe
Speaker 1: the original h study correct, Yeah, yeah, the original Morey's
Speaker 1: original graphs. So in this graph and we talked about
Speaker 1: diving down into the valley and then steadily trying to
Speaker 1: claw yourself out on the other side, very very steep ascent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you hit bottom and that's where you have a zombie.
Speaker 1: And as you begin to scale out of the uncanny valley,
Speaker 1: he has um uh myo electric hand and prosthetic hand
Speaker 1: down there. As you climb back up, eventually hitting ordinary
Speaker 1: doll and puppets and ill person and maybe hitting healthy
Speaker 1: person at the very top. Again. But it's interesting you
Speaker 1: have prosthetic hand down there, because this next study looks
Speaker 1: at prosthetic and robotic and human hands. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: in the original study. More He talks about the variable
Speaker 1: creepiness of prosthetic hands. And I found I found this
Speaker 1: interesting because I don't know about you, but but growing up,
Speaker 1: I felt like crazy robot hands, especially we're everywhere like
Speaker 1: every G. I. Joe show or he Man type franchise,
Speaker 1: there's always somebody. It could be a villain, it could
Speaker 1: be a hero. But there were crazy robot hands galore. Uh,
Speaker 1: And I always found them cool, and I feel like
Speaker 1: a lot of us probably even fetishized them to a
Speaker 1: certain point, Like we we didn't understand what it would
Speaker 1: necessarily be like to lose and lose a hand and
Speaker 1: the shortfall and the ability of technology at the time
Speaker 1: and even today to replace that missing limb, but we thought, well,
Speaker 1: that looks cool. Superpowered robot hands signed me up. Right.
Speaker 1: But back to the study two thousand thirteen University of
Speaker 1: Manchester study, and they looked at prosthetic hands. UH. They
Speaker 1: used of forty three right handed participants, thirty six female
Speaker 1: and seven male, and they were all looking at photos,
Speaker 1: and the photos were divided into three categories human hands,
Speaker 1: robotic hands like no question about it, that's a robot
Speaker 1: hand I'm looking at like straight up terminator exoskeleton or
Speaker 1: or or even less human, and then prosthetic hands. The results,
Speaker 1: I have to say, reading through some some of the
Speaker 1: writing about this UH and the original press release, the
Speaker 1: results were kind of confusing sounding. They the subjects here
Speaker 1: preferred human hands and robot hands, but but rated and
Speaker 1: certainly rated prosthetic hands is more uncanny, But prosthetics that
Speaker 1: looked more human were less eerie. Okay, so, so something
Speaker 1: that's clearly a robot that's not too creepy. Something's clearly
Speaker 1: a human that's not too creepy. If something is a
Speaker 1: 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 Valley,
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 life like limb. But if you're just looking
Speaker 1: at it, if you don't have to worry about its
Speaker 1: eye contact, you don't have to worry about micro expressions. Uh,
Speaker 1: it seems like it would be an easier peak to surmount. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that 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 if you thinking to be easier
Speaker 1: to replicate? Yeah, uh and uncanny Valley. Let's face it,
Speaker 1: when we talk about it, most of the time we're
Speaker 1: talking about faces. Right now, Speaking of faces, there's another study. UM.
Speaker 1: This is a two thousand and eleven University of California,
Speaker 1: San Diego study. UM. This is published in the Social
Speaker 1: Cognitive and Effective Neuroscience. And they did exactly what you'd
Speaker 1: expect researchers to do when confronted with the Uncanny Valley.
Speaker 1: Grab the f m r I and see what our
Speaker 1: brains are doing when we're looking at all these images.
Speaker 1: So all these fMRI I studies, all right, well, what
Speaker 1: what did they find? All right, I'll roll through the
Speaker 1: basics of the study here. So twenty subjects, not a
Speaker 1: not a huge study here, aged twenty to thirty six.
Speaker 1: And here were some of the caveats they had in
Speaker 1: selecting these individuals. No experience working with robots, no time
Speaker 1: spent in Japan, no friends or family from Japan because
Speaker 1: they wanted to avoid uh, any you know, potential cultural
Speaker 1: exposure that would have made them would make them more
Speaker 1: accepting of androids. Okay, so the idea is that maybe
Speaker 1: in Japan people just experience humanoid robots way too much. Already,
Speaker 1: they're too they're acclimatized to them. Yeah, that that's the
Speaker 1: the argument they made, and laying out the study, let's
Speaker 1: let's not even go there, let's just deal with people
Speaker 1: who have less exposure to robots. And they were shown
Speaker 1: twelve videos of a humanoid robot named repley Q two.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I'm looking it up right now. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's rough. But well, they watch video twelve videos of
Speaker 1: this robot doing there is things, and they were shown
Speaker 1: videos of humans doing the same things. And in fact,
Speaker 1: the robots movements and mannerisms were patterned directly after the humans.
Speaker 1: So you had a you had a human version of
Speaker 1: the actions, you had an android version of the actions, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a lifelike robot, and then you had a
Speaker 1: a stripped down version of the androids. So basically the
Speaker 1: android of all its skin ripped off, so it looks
Speaker 1: more like a robot, clearly a robot, and it's doing
Speaker 1: the same motions as well. So this broke it all
Speaker 1: down to a human with biological appearance in movement, a
Speaker 1: robot with mechanical appearance and mechanical motion, and a human
Speaker 1: seeming agent with the exact same mechanical movements as the robot.
Speaker 1: Then in came the f M R I scans. So
Speaker 1: the main brain area of note here, the the area
Speaker 1: that that that that lit up where we saw the
Speaker 1: most activity, the parietal cortex on both sides of the brain,
Speaker 1: specifically in the areas that connect the part of the
Speaker 1: brain's visual cortex that process bodily movements with the section
Speaker 1: of the motor cortex thought to contain mirror neurons. Okay,
Speaker 1: so those would be like the empathy parts of the
Speaker 1: brain where you know, we we see something going on
Speaker 1: in some other creature like us, and we empathize with
Speaker 1: it exactly. Yeah, So when viewing the human looking android,
Speaker 1: the brain lit up at the recognition of a human form,
Speaker 1: but registered essentially a computing error over the movement. Something
Speaker 1: didn't match up. Uh so it's it's not. According to
Speaker 1: this study, it would seem that it's not the biological
Speaker 1: movement or the biological appearance, it's the congruents or lack
Speaker 1: of congruents between the two. You look alive, but you're dead,
Speaker 1: you look dead, but you move you or you speak
Speaker 1: as if you're alive. Um. So, the researchers noted that
Speaker 1: this is something that could be retuned through exposure, but
Speaker 1: it could be at the heart of what's going on
Speaker 1: with the Uncanny Valley. Interesting. Well, I think we should
Speaker 1: look at one more study potentially providing recent support for
Speaker 1: the existence of the Uncanny Valley, and then maybe after
Speaker 1: that we should break and then come back next time
Speaker 1: to get into the causes, what what would be causing
Speaker 1: this effect and uh in the future. So I want
Speaker 1: to look at a study that came out in two
Speaker 1: sixteen in the journal Cognition by Mather and Ricling called
Speaker 1: Navigating a Social World with Robot Partners. A Quantitative cartography
Speaker 1: of the Uncanny Valley. Cute invocation of map making there
Speaker 1: because it does kind of make sense. I like the
Speaker 1: idea of mapping the valley because that indicates that it
Speaker 1: may expand beyond just the one dimensional dip and is
Speaker 1: in fact more of a topographical space, you know, like
Speaker 1: we can extend into three dimensions. But anyway, so to
Speaker 1: get into the study, the author's note that while the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley has very strong intuitive support, people tend to
Speaker 1: take it as fact. Experimental evidence for it has been
Speaker 1: limited and inconsistent. As as we mentioned earlier, some studies
Speaker 1: seem to find evidence for the valley. Others don't you know,
Speaker 1: they say this, this isn't necessarily a thing. So there
Speaker 1: are multiple experiments here. First, they did a thing that
Speaker 1: I think was pretty smart. If they were trying to
Speaker 1: chart a linear progression of the up and down peaks
Speaker 1: and valleys, they tried to generate an objectively determined gradient
Speaker 1: of more and less human looking robots. So what a
Speaker 1: lot of these studies do is maybe along the macaques
Speaker 1: study ideas, they show you a lawnmower man, they show
Speaker 1: you a real person, they show you a robot, uh,
Speaker 1: and they ask you to characterize you know, how do
Speaker 1: you feel about these? What they did here is that
Speaker 1: they gathered a very large sample or relatively large sample
Speaker 1: of eight images quote from the wild, meaning from the internet.
Speaker 1: So these wild type robots samples, and they had a
Speaker 1: bunch of inclusion and exclusion criteria. I don't want to
Speaker 1: get into all of them, but they tried to limit
Speaker 1: it to where it would it would kind of throw
Speaker 1: out all these variables. They could complicate things like they
Speaker 1: tried to keep just certain types of pictures of faces
Speaker 1: of real robots that are built and uh, and they
Speaker 1: had some exclusion criteria like it couldn't be a well
Speaker 1: known character, a famous person, um, it couldn't have objects
Speaker 1: overlapping the face, It couldn't be a toy, it had
Speaker 1: to be a real humanoid robot. And then they had
Speaker 1: subjects rate these images on what they call the mechano
Speaker 1: humanoid scale, basically to come up with an objectively derived
Speaker 1: score for each image by using this this empirical research,
Speaker 1: by going to a bunch of people and saying, hey,
Speaker 1: how mechanical is this? How human is this? And then
Speaker 1: after they had a rating for each of these eight images,
Speaker 1: and Robert have included an image, uh, I think down
Speaker 1: here to show you, like what all these robots where
Speaker 1: you can kind of see. It starts with things that
Speaker 1: look not human at all, just like a lump of
Speaker 1: wires and junk, and then it proceeds up to something
Speaker 1: that looks like a picture of a guy. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: very much. So. You start off with very kind of
Speaker 1: wally asque heads. When you move in through like like
Speaker 1: skinless gremlins, and then through the sort of the the
Speaker 1: expected hierarchy of humanoid robots. Okay, so they've got this thing,
Speaker 1: and then they rate all these images and sort them
Speaker 1: into an ascending scale of humanness. And then they took
Speaker 1: ratings in multiple different ways of likability and trustworthiness. Now,
Speaker 1: in likability, they claimed to find a robust uncanny valley effect,
Speaker 1: where likability increased linearly with humanoid qualities up to a
Speaker 1: certain point, and then it took a negative dip as
Speaker 1: the humanoid qualities continued to increase past that point, and
Speaker 1: then once again began to rise at the far end
Speaker 1: of the scale. Now, one thing I want to say,
Speaker 1: just looking at the results is it does not appear
Speaker 1: that people were the most bothered by the things that
Speaker 1: were the most human looking. Like given my understanding of
Speaker 1: the uncanny valley, I would have expected the stuff at
Speaker 1: the very top end the scale to be the most disturbing.
Speaker 1: But they actually kind of liked the stuff at the
Speaker 1: very top end of the scale. It was somewhere closer
Speaker 1: to the upper half middle of the scale that they
Speaker 1: really didn't like. Um, So, to whatever extent there is
Speaker 1: a real uncanny valley, it might not lie so close
Speaker 1: to the quote realism into the spectrum as we think.
Speaker 1: They also performed some trust experiments by creating a scenario
Speaker 1: where subjects would be asked to trust these robots to
Speaker 1: invest money for them, and the results there were basically
Speaker 1: they claimed that the trust uh experiments did show some
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley effects, but the results were a little more
Speaker 1: complicated than on the straightforward superficial likability scale, the likability
Speaker 1: really did look like Uncanny Valley was being displayed. They
Speaker 1: also performed experiments with a more traditional quote controlled series
Speaker 1: of composed face images, so it would just be a
Speaker 1: series of basically the same face as a robot than
Speaker 1: a little bit more human, little it more human, little
Speaker 1: bit more human on this gradient of human nous. And
Speaker 1: they generally claim to find that there was evidence for
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley effect in both likability and trust with
Speaker 1: both the wild caught robot image samples and with these
Speaker 1: composed face images that they came up with, But as always,
Speaker 1: more studies are needed. But that looks like there is
Speaker 1: one study showing pretty solid evidence that there is something
Speaker 1: like an Uncanny Valley effect. Yeah, and I like the
Speaker 1: idea that that that that it's it's an uncanny valley.
Speaker 1: But maybe it's just a more more nuanced from a
Speaker 1: topographical standpoint. You know, they're they're more a little little
Speaker 1: bumps and little valleys within the overall valley, little caves
Speaker 1: you can crawl into and just yourself inside, and maybe
Speaker 1: even caves that turn into tunnels that emerge on the
Speaker 1: other side. Yeah, that that's an interesting thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: like they point out that there's a lot of variability
Speaker 1: in their data. Actually, like it wasn't um If you
Speaker 1: look at their their plot chart of where all the
Speaker 1: data points fall and then they plot a line going
Speaker 1: through it, If you plot a line going through all
Speaker 1: their data, it does show the uncanny valley effect. But
Speaker 1: you know, there there are outliers all over the place,
Speaker 1: like there is some there are some robots that are
Speaker 1: just consistently more like more than the other ones. I
Speaker 1: find it interestingly that the some of the higher rated ones,
Speaker 1: or at least I think what number seventy nine in particular,
Speaker 1: kind of looks like a generic human as opposed to say,
Speaker 1: go down to seventy four that looks like a very
Speaker 1: specific human, Like if I had to pick him or
Speaker 1: pick the human he's patterned after assumingly out of a
Speaker 1: police lineup. I feel like I'd be able to do it,
Speaker 1: but also seventy four looks angry. I'm sorry, folks, you
Speaker 1: can't 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 factories here,
Speaker 1: and the authors icknoled 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, oh boy, it looks like
Speaker 1: a lot of these incomplete puppets are stripped awaite puppets,
Speaker 1: you see where they're like, all right, we got a
Speaker 1: lot of work to do on this thing, but at
Speaker 1: least we got the eyebrows and a mustache in place.
Speaker 1: But see, I find that one very likable. It doesn't
Speaker 1: look very human at all, but it's very I want
Speaker 1: to play with it. Yeah, okay, Robert, Well, we've got
Speaker 1: a bunch of more stuff to talk about, but think
Speaker 1: we should call it there and come back and finish
Speaker 1: our discussion of the Uncanny Valley next time. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: get into we'll go be on the Uncanny Valley. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we'll we'll talk about what might cause the Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley effect to whatever 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,
Speaker 1: head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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