Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. In this week's Select, it's Josh. By the way.
Speaker 1: We take a look at the Uncanny Valley, a theoretical
Speaker 1: phenomenon where robots give us the creeps as they get
Speaker 1: closer to looking human but still don't seem quite right,
Speaker 1: and we explore academic research into the creeps, which is
Speaker 1: pretty cool. So enjoy this episode. Welcome to Stuff You
Speaker 1: Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant,
Speaker 1: and there's Jerry over there doing the robot, which means
Speaker 1: this is stuff you should Know robot style. I knew
Speaker 1: i'd get a laugh out you sooner or later. Did
Speaker 1: you do the robot? Can you do the robot? I
Speaker 1: think I've seen you do pretty bad robot. Sure, I
Speaker 1: don't know about pretty bad robot. I can do a
Speaker 1: pretty great robot, that's what you've seen. I can't do
Speaker 1: any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either. And then, really,
Speaker 1: if your claim to fame as like a really great
Speaker 1: robot dance, I don't know, maybe take up some other
Speaker 1: hobbies as well. Kind of round that out. You don't
Speaker 1: want that to be the only thing you're good at, right,
Speaker 1: because if you list that on a dating site, you
Speaker 1: might turn ladies off. Yeah, according to e Harmony. Yeah
Speaker 1: that's foreshadowing. I love that one, don't you. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: some issues with that whole Oh yeah, bit, Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: get to that. This is tad all right. Well, let's
Speaker 1: start at 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 are 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
Speaker 1: guess thanks. In nineteen seventy, we're not just going just
Speaker 1: anywhere in nineteen seven, We're going to Japan in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: I bet Japan was pretty cool in the seventies. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A lot of bell bottoms, a lot of ninja running around. Still. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were calculators being wheelded all over the place. Probably
Speaker 1: it was a good time, 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 Morri. Nice, thank you, I have
Speaker 1: a lot of practice. And Massa Hiro Amori published this
Speaker 1: article and he named it Bukimi no tani gen show
Speaker 1: is actually the full name of the whole thing. And
Speaker 1: as we'll see, it's kind of difficult to translate into English, right,
Speaker 1: and it took many, many years after he wrote this
Speaker 1: article for it to be translated into English for anybody
Speaker 1: even tried to attempt it. So basically more was this
Speaker 1: roboticist and he wrote this essay, and at the time
Speaker 1: he just put it out there and went back to work,
Speaker 1: started teaching more and more roboticists. The whole new generation
Speaker 1: of roboticists learned under him, and his work just kind
Speaker 1: of sat there unobserved that article, i should say. And
Speaker 1: then in two thousand and five a rough translation of
Speaker 1: it was leaked out wasn't intended for publication, and the
Speaker 1: world entirely changed, right because massa hiro Omori had in
Speaker 1: his article put his finger on something that no one
Speaker 1: had before. In his capacities are roboticists and a human,
Speaker 1: and that was what we call today the uncanny Valley. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's um the idea that you're making a robot,
Speaker 1: and we'll see this apply to more than just robots,
Speaker 1: but in his case, you're making a robot and you
Speaker 1: want to make it look like a person, which I
Speaker 1: guess not all roboticists do. Some of them like the
Speaker 1: clunky jets and style robots like Rosy, But I guess
Speaker 1: if you're morey, you're you're on the path to designing
Speaker 1: lifelike robots. And the closer you get to that lifelike look,
Speaker 1: everything's going great, everything's going great, people are like, this
Speaker 1: is so cool, this is so cool. Yeah. Then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, people go oh, like, right as it
Speaker 1: approaches it's most or basically, when it reaches it's most
Speaker 1: lifelike capacity, that this whoever's making it can conjure people
Speaker 1: are repulsed by it. Yeah, which is something that most
Speaker 1: people who whoever hear of the Uncanny Valley or like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, that's I've noticed that that's happened to me
Speaker 1: before too. But the thing is, Chuck, it doesn't it
Speaker 1: doesn't actually make sense, right, Like we know a robot
Speaker 1: is a robot. Yeah, so you know, maybe you could
Speaker 1: be afraid that's gonna like pick you up and break
Speaker 1: you in two or something like a cartoon. But that's
Speaker 1: different than being creeped out by Like why would we
Speaker 1: be creeped out by a robot? And this is what
Speaker 1: Morey put his finger on, was there's something to this
Speaker 1: and it doesn't make sense. And he didn't. It wasn't
Speaker 1: even just um this article that he wrote. He created
Speaker 1: a graph as well that's become quite famous that um
Speaker 1: really kind of gets the point across more than anything else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he wasn't even the first person to go over
Speaker 1: this and to put a put some thought to it.
Speaker 1: Freud of course, because he'd like to think about everything.
Speaker 1: He thought about a little bit. And before Freud, there
Speaker 1: was a Geman name anst Yinched. Oh nice, I did
Speaker 1: not realize that's how his last name should be pronounced. Yinch.
Speaker 1: That's good stuff. I think I put a T on
Speaker 1: the end, but the teas in the middle. Yinch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's right. I've been saying Ginch, Well, we'll
Speaker 1: have to look that up. Then I think you're no.
Speaker 1: I think of the two of us, you you get
Speaker 1: the German down. And he had a little term called
Speaker 1: Umheimlich that he called it so like you know, different
Speaker 1: languages had different names for it, and you'd 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: lifelike was in the sixteen hundreds, people were like, uh,
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, Moriy 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 likeness, then on the
Speaker 1: y axis he had affinity, like whether or not you
Speaker 1: like the way this thing looks? Right? And just as
Speaker 1: we're talking about um the graph went up and up
Speaker 1: as things got more lifelike and people like the way
Speaker 1: it looked. And then at a certain point there is
Speaker 1: that valley, there's a big dip 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're not even one
Speaker 1: hundred percent sure what Morey meant by some of the
Speaker 1: words he chose, at least as far as translating them
Speaker 1: to English. Right. For example, bukimi Right, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: translated in two thousand and five as uncanny, but um
Speaker 1: again that that original translation was not intended for publication,
Speaker 1: but it leaked out, and so uncanny Anny Valley became,
Speaker 1: you know, the way we all think of it here
Speaker 1: in the West. But boukimi more closely resembles something like eerie.
Speaker 1: Like I've seen it explain that a word like boukimi
Speaker 1: means more than Uncanny's just weird or remarkable or noteworthy.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily something that gives you the creeps. Boukimi
Speaker 1: is something that gives you the creeps, like Steve Bukimi's exactly.
Speaker 1: So boukimi probably more should be should have been translated
Speaker 1: the Erie Valley, but by the time an actual official
Speaker 1: translation that m maury signed off on came out in
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. The cat was out of the bag. Everybody
Speaker 1: knew of it as the Uncanny Valley, and there's no
Speaker 1: way anybody who's going to come back and be like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: everybody stop calling it that. It's now the Eerie Valley, okay,
Speaker 1: right 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, like you know, a packaging
Speaker 1: robot in a factory, right that you know, apparently most
Speaker 1: people don't have fondness for I do because I love
Speaker 1: mechanical processes, right right, Okay, So there's there's part of
Speaker 1: the problem. It's like that's not necessarily the kind of
Speaker 1: feeling that Massa Hiro Morty was talking about. He was like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're interested in robotics and robotic arms and the industrial processes,
Speaker 1: and you love watching how it's made. Right, what he
Speaker 1: was talking about was more like how it resembles a
Speaker 1: human and then how it makes you feel in relation
Speaker 1: to its resemblance of a human. Right. Well, in that case,
Speaker 1: it makes me feel nothing because it doesn't look at
Speaker 1: all like a human, right, Okay, so that would be
Speaker 1: at about the origin of the graph. It has no
Speaker 1: resemblance to a human really, and it's not eliciting any
Speaker 1: real affinity in you at all as far as it
Speaker 1: looking like a human, right, But lots of affinity as
Speaker 1: a thing that's just that's called props. So you go
Speaker 1: a little bit further on the graph and then you
Speaker 1: have things like um little stuffed animals and I No.
Speaker 1: C three Po is a common one that's mentioned because
Speaker 1: C three Pou, you know, is built to look like
Speaker 1: a human. He does a great robot kind of it,
Speaker 1: talks like a human and acts like a human. But
Speaker 1: when it comes to that face, and as we'll see,
Speaker 1: the face is kind of the key to all this.
Speaker 1: For the most part, C three PO looks nothing like
Speaker 1: a human in the face. So everything's still good and
Speaker 1: people love C three PO. Right, So if you're looking
Speaker 1: at the graph, C three PO is going up in
Speaker 1: human likeness because he kind of you know, he's got
Speaker 1: some some commonality there, and we're feeling affinity for him
Speaker 1: on that human likeness. So it's he's going up. Yes, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going everything's going pretty well so far, right, Chuck,
Speaker 1: that's right. Okay, So then we're gonna start hitting some
Speaker 1: areas where things start looking a little more human, a
Speaker 1: lot more human, I would say than c three po
Speaker 1: like say, the characters in Moanna or Frozen picks our
Speaker 1: characters that kind of thing 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 big guys, small noses, things that make them cute, right,
Speaker 1: And so our affinity for them is going up as
Speaker 1: the human likeness is going up. Again, things are going
Speaker 1: really well so far, that's right, because in Mohanna and
Speaker 1: Frozen they look a little bit more like people, and
Speaker 1: we like them a lot more for that reason. Right.
Speaker 1: And then, like you said earlier, out of nowhere, the
Speaker 1: whole thing, this line that's just been going up very pleasantly,
Speaker 1: and a nice little slope just drops downward. Right, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't drop just downward, it goes actually below the
Speaker 1: X axis into negative territory. And now this is the
Speaker 1: uncanny valley, that's right, And that's why it has that name,
Speaker 1: because it's a valley, right, and this is where those
Speaker 1: things like really really lifelike androids live, or corpses live,
Speaker 1: or zombies live. Because Maury he had the idea that
Speaker 1: if something's moving, is even creepier than something similar to
Speaker 1: it that's not moving. So he actually created two lines
Speaker 1: on this graph, one for things that are animate and
Speaker 1: one for things that are inanimate. So if you look
Speaker 1: at this Uncanny Valley, on the inanimate line, the non
Speaker 1: moving line, you've got corpses are at the bottom of it.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the animate line, it's even
Speaker 1: it dips even further below than the inanimate line, and
Speaker 1: at the bottom of those are zombies. So dead people
Speaker 1: up and moving around and saying brains is as creepy
Speaker 1: as it gets as far as this graph is concerned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Maria wasn't the only one that earns yinch that
Speaker 1: we talked about the German psychiatrists. He also talked about
Speaker 1: the fact that if you are looking at something that
Speaker 1: should not be moving, and it moves. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think we can all agree that a baby doll that
Speaker 1: suddenly turns its head and looks at you, right, probably
Speaker 1: one of the creepier things you can witness, right, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's about as creepy as it gets. Or have you
Speaker 1: ever been to an open casket funeral? A few? I'm
Speaker 1: not a fan at all. No, it is it makes sense.
Speaker 1: You know, we've really kind of closed or put a
Speaker 1: lot of space in between us and death, way more
Speaker 1: than we used to have in like the nineteenth century. Oh,
Speaker 1: they either would sit up with the dead, sure, right,
Speaker 1: so this seems to be like kind of a holdover
Speaker 1: from that. But if you've ever been to an open
Speaker 1: casket 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 make
Speaker 1: yourself think you did actually see it move. You'll also
Speaker 1: be asked to leave the funeral. Well you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: like giving a commentary about this out loud, but you can,
Speaker 1: you know, you can do it to pass the time
Speaker 1: in the funeral if you're looking to kill some time.
Speaker 1: So here's the thing with all this. We know this
Speaker 1: happens because everyone kind of has this feeling, but no
Speaker 1: one and all this research has been done, and no
Speaker 1: one is exactly sure why this happens. So, uh, Maury's
Speaker 1: essay and especially once it was translated, a lot of
Speaker 1: research started happening in this area. And it's problematic though,
Speaker 1: because there are a few different problems. One is, well,
Speaker 1: it's it's subjective. This dependent variable, whether you have an
Speaker 1: affinity for something is very subjective, so it's hard to
Speaker 1: kind of nail that down scientifically, right, all right, So
Speaker 1: then number two is human likeness, right, this is the
Speaker 1: independent variable. Yeah, and if you have human likeness, like,
Speaker 1: what does that mean? Like what looks human? What doesn't
Speaker 1: look human? The like, 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 you know, the original hypothesis. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have a mathematical model that really specifies the shape
Speaker 1: of this curve. Right, 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. So researchers
Speaker 1: who are trying to seriously study the scientifically have nothing
Speaker 1: that they're actually trying to place their findings against, which
Speaker 1: leads to put it puts them at risk for what's
Speaker 1: called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Yeah, greatest name fallacy around,
Speaker 1: and it's based on the idea that if you take
Speaker 1: a sharpshooter out in Texas and have them shoot at
Speaker 1: the side of a barn a bunch of times, some
Speaker 1: of them are inevitably going to hit the barn, and
Speaker 1: then the Texas sharpshooter walks up and then draws the
Speaker 1: bull's eye around the bullets that he already sunk into
Speaker 1: 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 data that you get
Speaker 1: from testing the Uncanny Valley if you have no model
Speaker 1: to fit it into already. Yeah, I think they would
Speaker 1: have done better if they would have just instead of
Speaker 1: trying to prove something, to maybe just research and call
Speaker 1: it a thought experiment, right, you know, right, But people
Speaker 1: are taking it seriously, and we'll we'll talk about some
Speaker 1: of this research right after this, Chuck, all right, 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, there are
Speaker 1: people out there who are really studying the Uncanny Valley
Speaker 1: and trying to pin it down. Yeah. One of these
Speaker 1: people is at Dartmouth College psychologist. And I didn't look
Speaker 1: up their mascot, the pub Darts, the fighting pub darts
Speaker 1: at Dartmouth College. We're gonna hear from Dartmouth. But her
Speaker 1: name is Talia Wheatley, and she's done some research and
Speaker 1: has found that it's not just like some uniquely Western
Speaker 1: thing or American thing. It's kind of all over the world.
Speaker 1: She studied tribes in Cambodia and they have these same
Speaker 1: sensitivities to these things that look human but aren't human.
Speaker 1: And they've even found that and I think it kind
Speaker 1: of all comes down to the eyes. But they found
Speaker 1: just looking at the eye can be enough. Yeah, somebody
Speaker 1: can tell whether it's a human or not just looking
Speaker 1: at a picture of the eye, right. Yeah. And that's
Speaker 1: where I think people lose credibility in And we'll talk
Speaker 1: about movies and sculpture and all that stuff, but they
Speaker 1: just never get you can't get the eyes right, Like
Speaker 1: you can't put life in lifeless eyes. Yeah, hard, they try.
Speaker 1: Only God can u. And there was this other experiment
Speaker 1: where they, you know, like where you can morph af
Speaker 1: face digitally or whatever like that Michael Jackson Black or
Speaker 1: White video. Yeah. I think some people were creeped out
Speaker 1: by that even sure, but they would show this doll
Speaker 1: image and it would morph into a human face, and
Speaker 1: basically they would have people mark where they where they
Speaker 1: thought that it would look more human than doll and
Speaker 1: it you know, it landed about the sixty five percent
Speaker 1: mark as far as morphing into human, which I mean
Speaker 1: you can't really apply that necessarily, but just it's interesting offhand.
Speaker 1: Sixty five point is about where the Uncanny Valley happened
Speaker 1: in Maury's mind. Yeah, I would think it would be
Speaker 1: higher than that. Yeah, but um yeah, it's still super interesting.
Speaker 1: Um and you were saying that the eyes, and that's
Speaker 1: what you're betting on, is that it's going to turn
Speaker 1: out to be the eyes, right. Yeah. So trying to
Speaker 1: investigate what constitutes human likeness, there's a researcher named Angela
Speaker 1: Tinwell and she basically says, like, yes, it's all about
Speaker 1: the upper facial features and that we detect those, we
Speaker 1: read those. And so if there's any anything that's even
Speaker 1: just slightly off in like you know, the eyes or
Speaker 1: the brows or the wrinkles that form, that will lead
Speaker 1: to the Uncanny Valley. That's the creeping part or the
Speaker 1: smile too. She also says, well, yeah, and all these
Speaker 1: things kind of come down to evolution. And her point
Speaker 1: is like, you can't battle millions of years of evolution
Speaker 1: that has honed our our dumb, little human brain to
Speaker 1: detect something that's off about a face, right, it's just
Speaker 1: too much to overcome, basically, Right. This other researcher named
Speaker 1: Carl F. McDorman, who's from the University of Indiana, who actually,
Speaker 1: he's basically like dedicated his career to this. Now. He
Speaker 1: found that certain kinds of people, if you do like
Speaker 1: a personality inventory before testing for Uncanny Valley sensitivity, yeah,
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, yeah, and
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. People who are
Speaker 1: sensitive to that kind of thing tend to go off
Speaker 1: on the Uncanny Valley as well. And then people who
Speaker 1: are anxious are more likely to experience the Uncanny Valley
Speaker 1: as far as McDorman is concerned. Yeah, that anteresting makes
Speaker 1: sense too, because they're probably just more prone to be
Speaker 1: I don't know, just have a reaction to a lot
Speaker 1: of things like this. Right. But but we should say
Speaker 1: the science and all this, the fact that the independent
Speaker 1: and the dependent variable are still not defined. The science
Speaker 1: is this, This is like the scientific equivalent of that
Speaker 1: backward over the head half court basketball shot. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the level of science that these people are carrying out
Speaker 1: at this point, because there they're a lot of them
Speaker 1: sadly are conducting experiments based on something that again doesn't
Speaker 1: have a set, dependent or independent variable. So how can
Speaker 1: you do that? As my question, Well, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: because in each experiment, they're going to be using different stimuli,
Speaker 1: different faces, whether it's a doll or a wax figure
Speaker 1: or a CGI character, and then they're gonna be doing
Speaker 1: different things and have different expressions, and each person has
Speaker 1: their own subjective take, so it is a very tough
Speaker 1: thing to kind of nail down. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: some of them are actually trying to form the basis
Speaker 1: of this field of study right now, they're doing the groundwork.
Speaker 1: But I think some of them also are like just
Speaker 1: chasing headlines, Like there's no better way to get get
Speaker 1: into the media cycle with your study than releasing some
Speaker 1: findings on the uncanny Valley. People just tied up. Sure
Speaker 1: they love it. One thing I thought was interesting was
Speaker 1: at Princeton they tried this with monkeys and they found
Speaker 1: the same thing happen when they had these realistic looking
Speaker 1: but fake monkey faces. The monkeys were like ah and
Speaker 1: turned away. It did make me think, though, like all
Speaker 1: the you've seen these situations where like an orphaned animal
Speaker 1: has a creepy puppet mother. Yeah, I know exactly what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, and they seem to like that. But however,
Speaker 1: and this is a bit of a spoiler, but towards
Speaker 1: the end of this article, it points out that human
Speaker 1: babies don't have this reaction at first either, and that
Speaker 1: it's kind of learned. So maybe that explains it. Maybe
Speaker 1: with the animals. I know you're talking about that that cage,
Speaker 1: like why or monkey mother, it's super creepy. It's a
Speaker 1: black and white photo. Well, no, I mean they do it.
Speaker 1: There's all kinds of animals. Well, they'll they have like
Speaker 1: a fake tiger or a fake duck or whatever, just
Speaker 1: so the animal will feed or I mean it's usually
Speaker 1: an animal that that milks from the mother. I guess
Speaker 1: I see. But um, it's a common thing they do
Speaker 1: for orphaned milk feeding or breastfeed animals. And they're always creepy. Huh. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean to us, yeah, but to a dumb baby monkey,
Speaker 1: they're just like sweet, give me the teat yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a T shirt, maybe even a band name sweet give
Speaker 1: Me the Teat. Yeah, yeah, this kind of falls into
Speaker 1: the long band name category. Sure. But here's the thing is,
Speaker 1: not everyone agrees with this whole thing. Like you said earlier,
Speaker 1: There's a man named David Hanson and he's a roboticist
Speaker 1: as well in Plano, Texas, and he did a very
Speaker 1: very basic study. It was a survey where they showed
Speaker 1: images of two different robots that were animated to simulate
Speaker 1: human facial expressions and basically just asked, hey, what do
Speaker 1: you think of this? And seventy percent said I like them? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can you see why people had trouble with this
Speaker 1: study though? Yeah he said not one person said they
Speaker 1: were disturbed. Yeah, okay, sounds good for the most part, though,
Speaker 1: Studies into the uncanny valley or like now we're finding
Speaker 1: something here. Yeah, although we should be suspicious of ones
Speaker 1: that basically show the uncanny valley that Morey just graphed
Speaker 1: out of his like with freehand, right, Like if you
Speaker 1: if you've come across the study that shows that same thing,
Speaker 1: they're probably cherry picking data. Are you about to say
Speaker 1: out of his butt? Maybe there was another study Edward
Speaker 1: Schneider at Sunny Potsdam in New York. I bet they
Speaker 1: don't even have a mascot. They got together seventy five
Speaker 1: characters from cartoons and video games, everyone from Mickey Mouse
Speaker 1: to Laura Croft and who is very attractive by the way,
Speaker 1: she's a computer character. Yeah. Well no, I'm talking about
Speaker 1: playing tomb Raider. Yeah. I never played. Yeah when it
Speaker 1: first came out, you know, I played tomb Raider and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, I look at her. Laura Croft
Speaker 1: is kind of hut she well, she's she gets a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff done. That's very attractive. I'm not true
Speaker 1: what that means. Well, she travels a lot. Oh, she's
Speaker 1: an independent person. Yeah, that's what I meant. I was
Speaker 1: attracted to her mind in her adventures. Right. So anyway,
Speaker 1: they ask people in this study, um, how attractive do
Speaker 1: you think these characters are? Or how repulsive do you
Speaker 1: think they are? And again there was um a graph
Speaker 1: with a dip in it at a certain point, as
Speaker 1: you would expect. Yep, careful, careful, everybody. So if you're
Speaker 1: if you're a robot designer, right, One of the things
Speaker 1: like even back in his essay written in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Massa Hiro Morey said, Um, there's there's problems here with movement.
Speaker 1: There's problems here with the smile. It has something to
Speaker 1: do with the face, right yeah, um, And somebody else
Speaker 1: said I don't remember who it was, but there's there
Speaker 1: always seems to be a lag time between how realistic
Speaker 1: a designer can make a robot and how realistic an
Speaker 1: engineer can make that robot look. Yeah, right, and that
Speaker 1: that disconnected Maury's mind was a big part of the
Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley, but he also seemed to focus on the
Speaker 1: smile on the eyes and one of the things that's
Speaker 1: at stake, like besides this just being like an interesting
Speaker 1: topic of discussion, like there are actual real world implications
Speaker 1: for this whole thing, right, Like, if you're a robot designer,
Speaker 1: you want to create something that's not going to freak
Speaker 1: people out because the whole purpose of robots is to
Speaker 1: interact with humans, and you want them to interact with humans.
Speaker 1: I should say life like looking at robots, right, because
Speaker 1: like Ford Motor companies ever gonna buy an android that
Speaker 1: looks human to just work on an assembly line when
Speaker 1: they can get the same thing that does the same
Speaker 1: job cheaper when it just looks like a robotic arm
Speaker 1: or something. Right, the whole purpose of a lifelike looking
Speaker 1: robot is because that robot is being designed to interact
Speaker 1: with humans. And if you are going to run into
Speaker 1: this spot, some people say it's not even a valley.
Speaker 1: Some people think it's insurmountable, a cliff or a wall.
Speaker 1: So if you're going to run up against this, you
Speaker 1: want to figure out how to overcome it, because you
Speaker 1: don't want to creep people out with your creations. Well,
Speaker 1: and you don't want to spend a lot of money
Speaker 1: to develop a robotic Walmart greeter at every store, because
Speaker 1: it's it's happening like this is coming people. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a robot called Geminoid F or Actroid F, depending on
Speaker 1: who you ask. I've also seen her called Ellie, and
Speaker 1: she is out of this lab by a guy named
Speaker 1: Hiroshi Ishiguro, and he is probably the world's leading roboticist.
Speaker 1: If you've seen any life like android, it probably came
Speaker 1: out of this guy's lab, right, Yeah, And she is
Speaker 1: starting to get out there in the world. She's been
Speaker 1: a debriefer of soldiers coming back from war with PTSD
Speaker 1: based on the idea that they might share more with
Speaker 1: a robot that they knew was just a robot than
Speaker 1: they would an actual human. Yeah, she's in a play.
Speaker 1: She stars as an android. Good role. 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, geminoid f
Speaker 1: looks great and really like Ishiguro is doing great, great work.
Speaker 1: Casper looks terrifying, right, and so Casper is creepy. But
Speaker 1: that's not his purpose at all, right now, of his
Speaker 1: purpose 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 Ishiguro and say, hey,
Speaker 1: we have this great cause, can you make us something
Speaker 1: that doesn't look like the stuff of nightmares? Right exactly?
Speaker 1: I wonder if Casper has been effective, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know. Now I feel bad I
Speaker 1: didn't look into that. Well, I just I don't know.
Speaker 1: He's very creepy looking. I agree wholeheartedly. It's kind of like, no,
Speaker 1: he's not finished, get back to the drawing board. Either
Speaker 1: that or and this is what Moury said, like go
Speaker 1: the other way, Like just make him not human at all,
Speaker 1: just cute or approachable. Right, So the robotists are not
Speaker 1: the only ones who are facing this chuck. There is
Speaker 1: a pretty powerful moneyed contingent of people who are interested
Speaker 1: stakeholders in overcoming the uncanny Valley, or at least figuring
Speaker 1: out if it's totally insurmountable. And that is Hollywood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Hollywood has a sort of a rich history of getting
Speaker 1: it wrong when it comes to creepy CGI characters. Pixarhad
Speaker 1: their very first short film actually is called Tin Toy.
Speaker 1: It's a little five minutes short, and they showed it
Speaker 1: to this you know, this proceded toy story and everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was actually kind of like the outline of Toy
Speaker 1: stories plot. Yeah, but they showed it to test audiences
Speaker 1: and they made the mistake of making the baby Billy
Speaker 1: look too realistic, and everyone loved Tin Toy and everyone
Speaker 1: hated Billy. Yeah have you seen it? Yeah? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I hate Billy. Yeah, he's pretty hateable for sure, and
Speaker 1: he has the antagonist, but he struck some chord with
Speaker 1: viewers that that Pixar did not mean to strike, right,
Speaker 1: and they actually, I mean, this is extraordinarily fortunate for Pixar. Sure,
Speaker 1: this is very early on in their history, and they
Speaker 1: learned from it. Actually they're like, Okay, note to self,
Speaker 1: 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. Yeah, obviously, because they've had tons
Speaker 1: of success with that model. Right, you can make the
Speaker 1: case that it may have saved the company because other
Speaker 1: companies and other movies, for sure, have not been nearly
Speaker 1: as fortunate. Yeah. One of the first big photo real
Speaker 1: computer animated movies was Final Fantasy Colon the Spirits Within.
Speaker 1: You should never have a colon in your movie title,
Speaker 1: by the way, So that was the first mistake. But
Speaker 1: this one was from two thousand and one and based
Speaker 1: on the video game, and it was off putting to
Speaker 1: a lot of people, and it was a big, big
Speaker 1: bomb for Columbia Pictures. And but this is before Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley had really been established, Before Maury's essay was translated,
Speaker 1: so reviewers didn't quite know what to say. Now they
Speaker 1: would just say, we've tumbled into the Uncanny Valley again,
Speaker 1: but they would say things like Peter Traver's Great reviewer
Speaker 1: from Rolling Stone said, at first, it's fun to watch
Speaker 1: the characters ellipsis, ellips, ellips. But what's an ellipsis is
Speaker 1: that two of them? A couple of them. But then
Speaker 1: you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality
Speaker 1: in the movements, familiar voices emerging from the mouths of
Speaker 1: replicants erect a distance. Yeah, so he's describing the Uncanny Valley.
Speaker 1: He just didn't have the name of it yet. And
Speaker 1: then a couple of years later you had the Polar Express,
Speaker 1: which became I think even more famous than Final Fantasy
Speaker 1: totally as far as the Uncanny Valley goes. But again,
Speaker 1: it's like you said, you know, the reviewers didn't know
Speaker 1: how quite to put their finger on it. And I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure how Final Fantasy was done, but I
Speaker 1: know that Polar Express used similar software and hardware to
Speaker 1: what roboticists are using now, where it's like motion capture,
Speaker 1: but rather than translating the motion to the robot. It's
Speaker 1: translating the motion into like a digital three D rendering
Speaker 1: of the character. Right. Yeah, So Polar Express was really
Speaker 1: really expressive, but not quite there. So it fell really
Speaker 1: hard in the young Canny Valley. And I think David
Speaker 1: Germaine of the Associated Press compared the kids in this
Speaker 1: heartwarming family Christmas movie to the children from Village of
Speaker 1: the Damned. Yeah, which is not what you want. It's
Speaker 1: not at all what the studio wanted. And I think
Speaker 1: it lost a pretty decent amount of money. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was another one, and these are all, by the way,
Speaker 1: courtesy of Robert Zemecas he really had his He went
Speaker 1: all in on this technology. I don't know why. I
Speaker 1: think he just I think sometimes as an artist you
Speaker 1: can get so wrapped up in the coolness of wow,
Speaker 1: look what we can do now that you don't step
Speaker 1: back and look at what you're doing. Look should should
Speaker 1: we be doing this? Because he also had a part
Speaker 1: in the Beowulf movie in two thousand and seven that
Speaker 1: was a huge bomb in The New York Times said
Speaker 1: this about that people who are meant to be enraged,
Speaker 1: who are at risk of plummeting to their deaths, just
Speaker 1: look a little out of sorts. When it was over,
Speaker 1: I felt relieved to be back in the company of
Speaker 1: uncreepy flesh and blood humans again sad. And then did
Speaker 1: you see 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 think.
Speaker 1: I was about to say, I think Spielberg has come
Speaker 1: the closest to overcoming that chasm of anybody. But did
Speaker 1: he do it through good storytelling or through the eyes
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know if it I don't know.
Speaker 1: If it was a combination of the two. I don't know.
Speaker 1: But it is extraordinarily, it's an extradit so you know,
Speaker 1: those that that stuff you'll see every once a while,
Speaker 1: wish somebody does like what Beavis and butt Head would
Speaker 1: actually look like in real life, or what Charlie Brown
Speaker 1: would look like in real life. Fantastic, right, So it
Speaker 1: still has kind of got a cartoonish quality to it.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing with the Tintin movie. But it
Speaker 1: was like it was as if you were living in
Speaker 1: a dimension where humans looked somewhat cartoonish. Is that making
Speaker 1: any sense or does that just make the whole thing
Speaker 1: even harder to understand? No? I get that. So so
Speaker 1: he somehow was like, here, I'm not trying to nail
Speaker 1: what humans look like. I'm going to take you to
Speaker 1: another world where these people live. And if you lived
Speaker 1: in this world, you would look like this too. It's
Speaker 1: it's weird. It's like he bridged an uncanny valley that
Speaker 1: doesn't exist in this dimension. Yeah, he built a temporary
Speaker 1: disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley, right. I think the
Speaker 1: biggest example in recent years was, or the one that
Speaker 1: got the most attention was in Rogue One. Did you
Speaker 1: see that? The Star Wars movie. I haven't seen any
Speaker 1: of the new Star Wars ones except for I've seen
Speaker 1: the first six, I guess, but none of the two
Speaker 1: new new ones. Well, in Rogue one, they completely bring
Speaker 1: back to life Grand Moth Tarkin, who was played by
Speaker 1: the deceased Peter Cushing, and they brought him back as
Speaker 1: a character in this movie and in the theater like
Speaker 1: when he when it first happens, he's got his back
Speaker 1: to you, and it's sort of in the shadows and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh wow, like that's pretty cool. And I
Speaker 1: didn't know that they would do that, but they they
Speaker 1: got too comfortable, I think, and showed too much and
Speaker 1: gave him too many lines and too much light, and
Speaker 1: then it became Uncanny Valley really. Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: Think about poor Peter Cushing's family having to see that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know how, but they just weep during that
Speaker 1: that movie. Well, I'm curious about like life rights and
Speaker 1: image rights and stuff like that, if they had to
Speaker 1: get that cleared. I don't even know. I'm sure there's
Speaker 1: a backstory there. Oh. Cushing was famously mellow. That was
Speaker 1: he He would have taken and draw off his dubie
Speaker 1: and been like that's whatever. Man. Yeah. I think he
Speaker 1: spent the last year of his life on his weed
Speaker 1: farm in northern California. Right, what about this Mars Needs Moms.
Speaker 1: I had never ever heard of that movie, and so
Speaker 1: I went and watched the trailer and I still was like,
Speaker 1: I have no idea what this is. Yeah, you know
Speaker 1: that comic strip bloom County. Well, you know, I'm a huge,
Speaker 1: huge life along Bloom County fan. Oh okay, so Burke
Speaker 1: so maybe you know how to say the last name.
Speaker 1: It's Berkeley. Breathed or breathed. They said breathed, but I
Speaker 1: don't know if I've ever heard it said out loud.
Speaker 1: Breathed sounds nice. Let's go with that. So Berkeley breath
Speaker 1: the person, the guy who did Bloom County. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: wrote a book, a children's book called Mars Needs Moms,
Speaker 1: And basically Mars had some sort of shortage of moms.
Speaker 1: So the Martians came and kidnapped human moms and it
Speaker 1: was up to the human kids to go get their
Speaker 1: moms back from Mars. Right, pretty cute little premise, but
Speaker 1: they took it and ran it through Zemeckis's nightmare mill
Speaker 1: u right. Image Movers Digital was the was the trade
Speaker 1: name of it, but everybody knew it's just steer clear
Speaker 1: of this place, right, Yeah. And this was like the
Speaker 1: Apex or the what's the opposite of the Apex? The Valley,
Speaker 1: I guess, so the deepest part of the CGI Valley,
Speaker 1: of the Uncanny Valley, right, it was what the stuff
Speaker 1: that they created. It was so off and just so
Speaker 1: spectacularly and colossally off that when I guess Disney came
Speaker 1: along and bought this company. They came in, looked around
Speaker 1: and said, we're shutting you down. This movie's that we're
Speaker 1: not doing this anymore. What you guys are doing here
Speaker 1: is wrong, and you're all going to jail. Yeah, here's
Speaker 1: my thoughts on that. I watched the trailer and it
Speaker 1: didn't look any worse than any of the other ones
Speaker 1: to me. And in fact, I don't know the character's names,
Speaker 1: but there's a kid and then there's this one kind
Speaker 1: of chubby guy in mars. Yeah, the chubby guy looked
Speaker 1: pretty good. Actually, I thought I think this was a victim.
Speaker 1: I bet the movie sucked really bad. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think it was the last straw at the end of
Speaker 1: all these Uncanny Valley failures. Yeah, because this again, this
Speaker 1: is the same company that had created a Polar Express. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Nightmare Factory and a Christmas Carol did not do
Speaker 1: very well either. So yeah, I think it definitely bore
Speaker 1: the brunt of its predecessors as well. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: thought this was as bad as it got. If you
Speaker 1: ask me, I totally saw what Disney saw with this one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anytime something is marked as the thing that killed the thing, right,
Speaker 1: it's always just the last thing. Yeah, you're right, you know, yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: but it could have also been the thing that saved
Speaker 1: the thing had they gotten it right. You know, that's true.
Speaker 1: So like that, Maury was like, and every time I
Speaker 1: say more now unless I say it like Mory just
Speaker 1: saying morey Jewish guy, I think I think of the
Speaker 1: Wig Salesman and Goodfellas. Yeahs like give me money and
Speaker 1: ray leotis this in their laughing because More's two payfalls off.
Speaker 1: Imagine that guy is the guy who came up with
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley. Okay, he gives a whole different spin
Speaker 1: to it, right, Yeah. So Moury says, um, just don't
Speaker 1: even try. Guys like you're never going to be able
Speaker 1: to do this, even if you can, We're so far
Speaker 1: away from it. And this is in nineteen seventy he
Speaker 1: was saying it, and it still holds true. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're so far away from this that that just maybe
Speaker 1: put your put your emphasis elsewhere. And the example he
Speaker 1: gave was say, like a prosthetic hand, right, yea, 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 wood, 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 nineteen seventy, and he went on to teach a
Speaker 1: lot of people roboticists, or a lot of roboticists as well.
Speaker 1: And that very famous robot Asimo Osimo, you know, the
Speaker 1: one I'm talking about. He was one of the first
Speaker 1: ones that could jog in place. And he's kind of
Speaker 1: humanoid for sure, but very cute, all white, shiny lacquer plastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've seen him before. He was created by one of
Speaker 1: Morey's students, who clearly subscribe to Maury's theory that you.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna you're not gonna overcome the Uncanny Valley.
Speaker 1: So just make these things exaggerated and non human like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you'll you'll have people love your robot. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think that's a good tech. Yeah. All right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take another break here and then come back and finish
Speaker 1: up with a little bit. We're gonna take a step
Speaker 1: back and just talk generally about creepiness, all right. So
Speaker 1: I promised that we would talk about creepiness. So that's
Speaker 1: what we'll do. You promised. Chuck the creeps such a
Speaker 1: great phrase. Everyone says it gives me the creeps. It's
Speaker 1: just such a just it's one of those phrases that
Speaker 1: sums things up so perfectly. It's livid as a fresh bruise.
Speaker 1: And we have Charles Dickens to thank for this, evidently,
Speaker 1: because he gets credit for using the creeps. In David
Speaker 1: Copperfield in eighteen forty nine, people had had this feeling before,
Speaker 1: this sort of unpleasant off you know what it feels
Speaker 1: like to get the creeps. But they said things like
Speaker 1: eel like or clammy. Not bad, not bad. But if
Speaker 1: you said that thing makes me feel eel like. Today
Speaker 1: people would be like, what the heck are you talking about? Right?
Speaker 1: I think also you would use that to describe somebody
Speaker 1: who gave you the creeps as well, like that guy's
Speaker 1: really clammy, you know what I mean? Sure, all that
Speaker 1: means you're touching them though, like like Peter Lorie would
Speaker 1: be clammy or eel like in some of his characters.
Speaker 1: You know, Peter Lourie, I do too. 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 to
Speaker 1: the Uncanny 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, into the creeps. The creeps exactly right.
Speaker 1: So you talked about Ernst Yinch Yeah, yeah, I'd get it.
Speaker 1: Sure it was probably the first person to actually sit
Speaker 1: down and study the creeps or creepiness. I bet he
Speaker 1: was creepy himself. I don't know. I think he was
Speaker 1: just kind of a neat thinking man, right, So yinch Man,
Speaker 1: I like saying his name a lot more now. He
Speaker 1: wrote an essay in nineteen oh six called on the
Speaker 1: Psychology of the Uncanny, and that's the English translation. The
Speaker 1: German word he used, like you said, is high aimlich
Speaker 1: Is that right, M not in unheimlich unheimlich Yeah, okay, nice,
Speaker 1: getting better, thank you? Uh. He he used that word.
Speaker 1: And Unheimlich is a variation of the word heimlich um,
Speaker 1: which is not just to say the maneuver. It means
Speaker 1: something else entirely, which is homie, we're familiar, right, Yeah.
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
Speaker 1: um are more prone to have these uncanny experiences because
Speaker 1: they're critical thinkers about the world. Right, So uh that
Speaker 1: makes sense, 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 and go
Speaker 1: eat a whole thing at chips ahoy, and hide under
Speaker 1: the covers. Right. He also actually went even further and said,
Speaker 1: it's it's possible that all of humanity's knowledge has been
Speaker 1: accrued over these millions of years from the people investigating
Speaker 1: what's behind this creepiness. Yeah, it's a pretty weird and
Speaker 1: neat theory of knowledge. Well. Yeah, and speaking of theories,
Speaker 1: there are a bunch of theories on creepiness and why
Speaker 1: this happens, and I think they're all pretty interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The first one is called pathogen avoidance theory, and we
Speaker 1: talked earlier about evolution, and this one kind of fits
Speaker 1: into that bucket. Basically, a warning that we have evolved
Speaker 1: to have in our brain says that person is off,
Speaker 1: they are diseased, even you don't want to go near them, right,
Speaker 1: you want to avoid that pathogen makes sense. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty pretty approachable. Sure. There's another one that I've seen
Speaker 1: that's I think fairly recent, and it's the idea that
Speaker 1: things give us the creeps when when they're trying to
Speaker 1: nonverbally mimic people. Yeah, and so like a robot doesn't
Speaker 1: do it, so we're like, oh, that's unsettling, or somebody
Speaker 1: who you would describe as clammy or eel like maybe
Speaker 1: overdoes it a little bit. Yeah, like they're trying to
Speaker 1: fit in. It's not natural to them. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: can give you the creeps 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. 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 hand,
Speaker 1: it may give you the creeps, right, And that is
Speaker 1: 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 unch or somebody who said
Speaker 1: that creepiness what gives us the creeps one time might
Speaker 1: not give us the creeps later on, Yeah, which will
Speaker 1: kind of come into play later like Ernst Junch. Basically
Speaker 1: he laid the groundwork for the study of creepiness, and
Speaker 1: it seems to have gotten a lot of it right
Speaker 1: right out of the gate. Yeah, and like you said,
Speaker 1: if it doesn't give you the creeps later, then that
Speaker 1: would fit neatly into the violation of expectation, because then
Speaker 1: you can change your expectation, right exactly, Yes. Yes. Another
Speaker 1: one's mortality salience theory. Yeah, this one Mori and Freud
Speaker 1: both subscribed to, and it basically said that we when
Speaker 1: we encounter like a robot or an automaton in Freud's day,
Speaker 1: they remind us of dead people, which in turn gets
Speaker 1: our mind to thinking about how we're going to die
Speaker 1: one day, And so all of a sudden we find
Speaker 1: ourselves in the uncanny valley, right, which again raises another
Speaker 1: sorry for the sidetrack, but raises another of Unch's points.
Speaker 1: Is uncanniness inherent in the object or is it inside
Speaker 1: the observer who's experiencing the creeps or uncannyness? I think
Speaker 1: it's in the observer. Yeah, I think it is, too,
Speaker 1: which would explain why it can go away you when
Speaker 1: you come to experience it again. Yeah, like this, when
Speaker 1: you go through the when you shake the same prosthetic
Speaker 1: hand again, it's not creepy the second time. It might
Speaker 1: even be interesting, or why some people might not experience
Speaker 1: it at all. Like someone might sit there and see
Speaker 1: a doll and the doll's head turns and looks at them,
Speaker 1: and they're like, neat, right, how much for that doll?
Speaker 1: Which means you've just met a serial killer? Right? And
Speaker 1: then the dolls creeped out after that? This one I
Speaker 1: like them, even though I can never say this word
Speaker 1: for some reason. And thro po morphism, nice job, 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,
Speaker 1: like 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. Yeah, And then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, on Caney Valley, which is a
Speaker 1: little bit about expectation too, I think those are crawls
Speaker 1: over a little I think sure, And so creepiness, I think,
Speaker 1: especially the modern incarnation of creepiness. This is these are
Speaker 1: my thoughts. They seem to be They represent a crossroads
Speaker 1: right where evolutionarily, creepiness I think was probably it alerts us.
Speaker 1: We're on alert when something's creeping us out. We're really
Speaker 1: focused on that thing, right then, Ye, but we're also
Speaker 1: bound by society not to just turn and run from
Speaker 1: anything that could conceivably be a threat. You can also
Speaker 1: take it a little further and say that evolutionarily speaking,
Speaker 1: it would not make sense for us to turn and
Speaker 1: run from every single thing that could conceivably be a
Speaker 1: threat before we've identified it as a threat, because we
Speaker 1: would be using up a lot of calories and energy,
Speaker 1: and we would have to find more food than we do.
Speaker 1: Would be inefficient. Right, So we're kind of bound socially
Speaker 1: to stand in place until we identify something as a
Speaker 1: threat or not, in which case, during this period, that's
Speaker 1: when we experience creepiness. Yeah, And I think everyone has
Speaker 1: experienced this. Like you're in a coffee shop or something
Speaker 1: and like some super creepy dude comes in and if
Speaker 1: you're liking me, you're just like, all right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep my eye on that guy. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna bolt and run, but it might stay near
Speaker 1: the door. Sure, you know, I might get my car
Speaker 1: keys ready exactly right. Uh, it is it's this weird
Speaker 1: social contract. Um, and you know I feel bad for
Speaker 1: people that just inherently look a little creepy. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: let's talk about that. Yeah. So there was these there
Speaker 1: are these researchers from Knox College who did what they
Speaker 1: build as the first empirical study of creepiness. And this
Speaker 1: is in twenty sixteen. Such a great study 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 that are concerned. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the first section said, hey, you know, what is
Speaker 1: the likelihood that this person is creepy? And there's like,
Speaker 1: you know, descriptions of them. There's forty four different behaviors, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the second part was participants rated the creepiness of
Speaker 1: twenty one different occupations. I love to see that list.
Speaker 1: The third section it said, list two hobbies that you
Speaker 1: think are creepy. They only needed too. It was open
Speaker 1: ended too. And then the last section the participants said
Speaker 1: whether or not they agreed with fifteen statements about the
Speaker 1: nature of creepy people. Yeah, and overall again like they
Speaker 1: found like, yes, if you have physical traits that people
Speaker 1: find creepy, like bulging eyes, or you lick your lips
Speaker 1: a lot, or you know, you you arch your fingers
Speaker 1: and then just kind of tap them together a lot, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's kind of creepy. But the Knox researchers concluded that
Speaker 1: those aren't creepy necessarily in and of themselves. It's when
Speaker 1: it's in conjunction with other creepy behavior that somebody comes
Speaker 1: across as creepy. Right, And of course, the one behavior
Speaker 1: they put in here I think there was probably universally
Speaker 1: creepy was someone who persistently steers the conversation toward a
Speaker 1: sexual topic, right, yeah, you don't, you don't do that.
Speaker 1: They also found no. They also found ninety five percent
Speaker 1: of participants and this is like I think eighteen hundred
Speaker 1: and thirteen hundred and forty one people, ninety five percent
Speaker 1: of them said that men were more likely to be
Speaker 1: creepy than women. Yeah, I think that's generally true. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't remember getting the creeps a lot in my
Speaker 1: life by strictly from the appearance of a woman, right,
Speaker 1: But a lot of dudes on a weekly basis give
Speaker 1: me the creeps. Sure, but we should say so. There's
Speaker 1: a website called girl dot com touurl 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 there are some
Speaker 1: things that apparently are universally creepy among boys with women. Right. Yeah,
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 bend. 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. Right. Although
Speaker 1: I will say in Fatal Attraction, the scene where she
Speaker 1: is sitting there clicking the light on and off, listening
Speaker 1: to Madam Butterfly, that was that was kind of creepy.
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of like a creepy woman.
Speaker 1: I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well, these are
Speaker 1: creepy behaviors though, you know, yeah, not like Glencoe's close
Speaker 1: walked into the room and you're like, oh, I don't
Speaker 1: know about that, right, right, right, there's a difference, right,
Speaker 1: There's a difference between genuine creepiness and just doing creepy things. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it is much harder for women to be
Speaker 1: creepy than men. Cannot think of a single actual creepy woman, No,
Speaker 1: I'd like to hear from people, though. Yeah. E harmony,
Speaker 1: So we've talked about Reddit, now we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: e harmony. Right. They had an article where they wrote
Speaker 1: advice to dudes. It was called how to avoid the
Speaker 1: creep Zone, right, and their advice was for your hobbies
Speaker 1: that you list to be just sort of vanilla, all right,
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, right,
Speaker 1: But Norman Bates was into taxidermy for a reason. In
Speaker 1: Psycho right, it was unsettling. Yeah, you know. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so the Knox people who carried out this survey, the
Speaker 1: Knox University researchers, they basically said, here's what we think
Speaker 1: it is. Here's creepiness explained. And what they explained was
Speaker 1: what can be called is the threat ambiguity theory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this one, I think they kind of put a
Speaker 1: cherry on top on this one. Yeah, we really did.
Speaker 1: Like it's just basically where you are creeped out by
Speaker 1: something because your hackles are raised right then, and it's
Speaker 1: because you haven't determined whether that thing's a threat or not. Yep. Right.
Speaker 1: There's another one though that I subscribe to. I think
Speaker 1: it is finally the unified theory of creepiness. I think
Speaker 1: it covers everything. And it's called the category ambiguity theory. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That was Now did David Livingstone Smith make this up
Speaker 1: or was he just champion this? I think he made
Speaker 1: it up because he wrote about the Knox researchers and said,
Speaker 1: what they're talking about you can call threat ambiguity category
Speaker 1: or threat ambiguity theory. With category ambiguity theory, he didn't
Speaker 1: cite anybody else, so it seemed to be his own construct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is the idea. It's sort of like the
Speaker 1: threat ambiguity in that there is some confusion, but it's
Speaker 1: not a threat like I think this dude in the
Speaker 1: coffee shop is gonna kill me. It's more like I
Speaker 1: don't know how to categorize that guy, right, and that
Speaker 1: freaks me out right. And it's based on what's called essentialism, right,
Speaker 1: where if you are a member of a species of animal,
Speaker 1: whether human or raccoon or tiger, there's something about you,
Speaker 1: or there's some collection or set of things about you
Speaker 1: that are totally unique to your species. Yeah, it's something
Speaker 1: you possess because you're a member that species. And because
Speaker 1: you're a member that species, you possess these things and
Speaker 1: it can be very difficult to put your finger on it.
Speaker 1: But it's just one of those things that you know
Speaker 1: when you see it, or no, when you don't see it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there are clear borders between these things. You either
Speaker 1: have this essence fully or you don't have it at all.
Speaker 1: You're lacking and you're missing it and something's really wrong.
Speaker 1: So in this article he used the example of a
Speaker 1: wax dummy. Yeah, have you ever been to like Madame Tussod's, Sure, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I find that the ones and again with the eyes,
Speaker 1: the ones that work the best, or the ones where
Speaker 1: they have sunglasses on. Oh yeah, you know 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 the skin itself. You know,
Speaker 1: it can only do so much. And Madam Tusso's and
Speaker 1: museums like that are the best of the best, and
Speaker 1: they do look pretty good. But that's the whole point
Speaker 1: with the uncanny Valley is you can't get ninety nine
Speaker 1: there and say we're fine. It's that one percent 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 or
Speaker 1: living Stone Smith sites the desert. Yeah, a dessert would
Speaker 1: be creepy when you saw it. Yeah, but so things
Speaker 1: that are a threat are creepy. But there's also things
Speaker 1: that are creepy that aren't a threat in this category.
Speaker 1: Ambiguity theory figured it out. So if that's true, Chuck
Speaker 1: and David Livingstone Smith figured out what is the basis
Speaker 1: of creepiness, we finally have the independent variable lickt and
Speaker 1: Massa hiro Morty's Uncanny Valley graph, and we can get
Speaker 1: to work. Is he still around? Yeah? Yes, when that's
Speaker 1: happy about all this, I get the impression that he's
Speaker 1: kind of like, just whatever, gone off on his own
Speaker 1: little thing, Okay, and he's fine. He wrote it in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy after all, you know, Yeah, I mean most
Speaker 1: fifty years ago. Yeah, so he's probably up there yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: are 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 grabst
Speaker 1: article too. But if you want to know more about
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley, cum read that Grabster article. You can
Speaker 1: type Uncanny Valley in the search bar at HowStuffWorks 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 going to butcher the dude's name,
Speaker 1: but that's right, take it away. It's a good one. Okay.
Speaker 1: I'm going to call this one email from a real
Speaker 1: Irish historian and it feels pretty good. Chuck, am I
Speaker 1: out of a job? Yeah? Maybe? Okay. Hi guys, I'm
Speaker 1: a big fan of the show. It's informative and insightful,
Speaker 1: and I find myself interested in things that I never
Speaker 1: looked twice at before. One subject that I'd always found
Speaker 1: fascinating was the correlation between the Native American Choctaw tribe
Speaker 1: and the people of Ireland. I didn't realize that was
Speaker 1: a thing that you not at all. This is a
Speaker 1: story which isn't well known, Okay, which isn't well known
Speaker 1: outside of some areas of Ireland and of course within
Speaker 1: the tribe. But it's a really good story of solidarity
Speaker 1: between two groups of people, despite being thousands of miles apart.
Speaker 1: Less than twenty years after the Trail of Tears, which
Speaker 1: forcibly displaced thousand of natives, the Great Famine hit Ireland.
Speaker 1: During this time, as you know, Ireland was colonized by
Speaker 1: the British and the people of Ireland were treated poorly
Speaker 1: due to the common misconception that Irish Catholics were lower
Speaker 1: caliber of human. He goes on to give more examples,
Speaker 1: but just suffice to say it was not good for
Speaker 1: the Irish people. During the famine, words spread to America
Speaker 1: and to the Choctaw tribe. They sympathized with the Irish
Speaker 1: people so much that only fifteen years after the Trail
Speaker 1: of Tears, they donated seven hundred and ten dollars during
Speaker 1: eighteen forty five to send to Ireland as part of
Speaker 1: a relief fund. This is estimated to be roughly sixty
Speaker 1: eight thousand dollars in today's money. This was greatly appreciated
Speaker 1: by the Irish people, and after the famine, the bond continued.
Speaker 1: In Cork, we have a sculpture honoring the tribute of
Speaker 1: the Choctaw people, and in nineteen ninety members of the
Speaker 1: tribe came to Ireland and walked the Famine Walk in
Speaker 1: Mayo to replicate the walk that starving people made to
Speaker 1: ask the landlord for help. In nineteen ninety two, an
Speaker 1: Irish commemoration group walked from Oklahoma to Mission to replicate
Speaker 1: the Trail of Tears and raised seven hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: to help poverty in Africa. These two groups continue to
Speaker 1: work together and to this day our President has declared
Speaker 1: an honorary member of the Choctaw tribe. Along with the
Speaker 1: Quakers who fed Irish people to the point that their
Speaker 1: members ended starving themselves, the Choctaw tribe remained some of
Speaker 1: the unsung heroes of the famine story of Ireland. Sorry
Speaker 1: it went on so long. I'm an Irish historian, so
Speaker 1: I tend to waffle. Love the show. Best of luck
Speaker 1: with yourselves, Royson kill roy Bean, fantastic, great story. Thanks
Speaker 1: a lot, Roisen. I'm quite sure that it's not the
Speaker 1: actual pronunciation of your name, because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: accent marks over letters there normally aren't, ye, So I
Speaker 1: apologize for that, but I nailed your last name. I'm
Speaker 1: positive of it. And Josh Clark three and a half stars,
Speaker 1: not bad out of three and a half. Right, I
Speaker 1: don't remember what was star search the four stars? Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't remember. I just just now remember there was
Speaker 1: such thing as Starson. Yeah, well okay, well you take
Speaker 1: that in part, Chuck, since I took listenermail, Oh geez,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening. Um. Hey, if you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us, you can go to our official pages.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know podcasts, what else? Let's see if
Speaker 1: they want to send us an email? Oh yeah, email
Speaker 1: us at stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com. And have
Speaker 1: a good day. Is that what you say? That's good enough?
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