The Technological Uncanny as a Permanent Dimension of Selfhood

Forthcoming in AI and society

This paper extends Mori's (2012) uncanny valley-hypothesis to include technologies that fail its basic criterion; namely that uncanniness arises when the subject experiences a discrepancy in a machine's human-likeness. In so doing, the paper considers Mori's hypothesis about the uncanny valley as an instance of what Heidegger calls the 'challenging revealing' nature of modern technology. It introduces seeming autonomy and heteronomy as phenomenological categories that not only ground human being-in-the-world but also our experience of things and people. I suggest that this categorical distinction is more foundational than Heidegger's existential structures and phenomenological categories. Having introduces this novel phenomenological distinction, I show the limits of Mori's hypothesis by drawing on an example from science fiction that showcases that uncanniness need not only be caused by machines that resemble human beings. I explore how the seeming autonomy-heteronomy distinction clarifies (at least some of) the uncanniness that can arise when humans encounter advanced technology and which is irreducible to the anthropocentrism that shapes Mori's original hypothesis.

Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 2020

This paper explores a technical unfinished half-method [Halbzeug] of a metaphorology (Blumenberg) of the technological other in its variations and the philosophical mise-en-scène of the techno-social uncanny. The roboticist Mori had revived the concept of a technological uncanny in human machine interaction in the spatial metaphor derived from a diagram of an uncanny valley in the reaction of a human being shaking an artificial hand in order to show why we feel a certain eeriness in relation to technological artefacts, a topic that gains importance today to reflect human technological automata relations with robots/AI/Avatars that mimic and socially resonate with humans and may even drive further technological transhumanism. Although in an artefact design approach uncanniness is said to be avoided in the humanlike automaton-human encounter this paper dwells on the critic of techno-social otherness avoidance by technological overcoming of obstacles and thus argues for a cybernetic uncanny that can't be avoided. This paper introduces in a broader sense than Mori's a philosophical dramaturgy of Emmanuel Levinas' temporal notion of the relation to the other, including a preliminary metaphorological variation of the temporal techno-social uncanny.

2015

The essay starts and ends with examples of the Danish cognitive scientist Henrik Schärfe's robotic copy of himself, hereby addressing the issue of the 'technological uncanny' that this and similar geminoid robots have occasioned. Schärfe's close collaboration with Japanese robotics scientist Ishiguro Hiroshi calls for an investigation of the global ows of visual robot imagination, transferred from the early postwar Japanese manga to the medium of 'limited animation' in TV anime of the 1960s. Referring to David MacDougall's notion of the corporeal image, I argue how limited animation provides options for a cinematic encounter in which the ambiguity of the image seems to make the anime medium particularly t to represent the unknown Otherness of android robots. This may also be what relates robot in animated lm ction with the development of humanoid robots in real life, and account for the way in which the technological uncanny in robots as well as in cinema has engaged scientists and writers since the early twentieth century. Robot The writing of this essay was made possible by a Japan Foundation Fellowship Grant in the spring of 2011. I would like to thank Associate Professor Môri Yoshitaka at Tokyo University of the Arts for hosting my project. An early version of this text was presented at ICOMAG (International Convention on Manga, Anime, Games and Media Arts) in connection with Japan Media Arts Festival 2012. In the text, Japanese names appear in their Japanese order with family name last, except in some publication references. [AQ3] : scientists today still investigate the boundaries between animate and inanimate, thereby contributing to a transvisual process leading from ctional representation to actual practice in a techno-scienti c context.

2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2017

Towards understanding the public's perception of humanlike robots, we examined commentary on 24 YouTube videos depicting social robots ranging in human similarity-from Honda's Asimo to Hiroshi Ishiguro's Geminoids. In particular, we investigated how people have responded to the emergence of highly humanlike robots (e.g., Bina48) in contrast to those with more prototypically-"robotic" appearances (e.g., Asimo), coding the frequency at which the uncanny valley versus fears of replacement and/or a "technology takeover" arise in online discourse based on the robot's appearance. Here we found that, consistent with Masahiro Mori's theory of the uncanny valley, people's commentary reflected an aversion to highly humanlike robots. Correspondingly, the frequency of uncanny valley-related commentary was significantly higher in response to highly humanlike robots relative to those of more prototypical appearances. Independent of the robots' human similarity, we further observed a moderate correlation to exist between people's explicit fears of a "technology takeover" and their emotional responding towards robots. Finally, through the course of our investigation, we encountered a third and rather disturbing trend-namely, the unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots. In exploring the frequency at which this sexualization manifests in the online commentary, we found it to exceed that of both the uncanny valley and fears of robot sentience/replacement combined. In sum, these findings help to shed light on the relevance of the uncanny valley "in the wild" and further, they help situate it with respect to other design challenges for HRI.

Ethics in Progress, 2019

There are many issues surrounding the introduction of social robots into society, including concerns about how they may be used to replace true social interaction in personal life, dehumanise formerly social occupations such as elderly care, and be perceived as more human than they actually are. This paper shall present a psychological perspective on the human reception of social robots and apply the gathered information to address these concerns.

Foundations of Computing and Decision Sciences, 2019

The main aim of the presented study was to check whether the well-established measures concerning the attitude towards humanoid robots are good predictors for the uncanny valley effect. We present a study in which 12 computer rendered humanoid models were presented to our subjects. Their declared comfort level was cross-referenced with the Belief in Human Nature Uniqueness (BHNU) and the Negative Attitudes toward Robots that Display Human Traits (NARHT) scales. Subsequently, there was no evidence of a statistical significance between these scales and the existence of the uncanny valley phenomenon. However, correlations between expected stress level while human-robot interaction and both BHNU, as well as NARHT scales, were found. The study covered also the evaluation of the perceived robots’ characteristic and the emotional response to them.

Frontiers in Psychology

2009

Abstract The Uncanny Valley hypothesis has been widely used in the areas of computer graphics and human-robot interaction to motivate research and to explain the negative impressions that participants report after exposure to highly realistic characters or robots. Despite its frequent use, empirical proof for the hypothesis remains scarce.

Frontiers in psychology, 2015

The Uncanny valley hypothesis, which tells us that almost-human characteristics in a robot or a device could cause uneasiness in human observers, is an important research theme in the Human Robot Interaction (HRI) field. Yet, that phenomenon is still not well-understood. Many have investigated the external design of humanoid robot faces and bodies but only a few studies have focused on the influence of robot movements on our perception and feelings of the Uncanny valley. Moreover, no research has investigated the possible relation between our uneasiness feeling and whether or not we would accept robots having a job in an office, a hospital or elsewhere. To better understand the Uncanny valley, we explore several factors which might have an influence on our perception of robots, be it related to the subjects, such as culture or attitude toward robots, or related to the robot such as emotions and emotional intensity displayed in its motion. We asked 69 subjects (N = 69) to rate the mo...

Frontiers in psychology, 2015

The uncanny valley theory proposed by Mori has been heavily investigated in the recent years by researchers from various fields. However, the videos and images used in these studies did not permit any human interaction with the uncanny objects. Therefore, in the field of human-robot interaction it is still unclear what, if any, impact an uncanny-looking robot will have in the context of an interaction. In this paper we describe an exploratory empirical study using a live interaction paradigm that involved repeated interactions with robots that differed in embodiment and their attitude toward a human. We found that both investigated components of the uncanniness (likeability and eeriness) can be affected by an interaction with a robot. Likeability of a robot was mainly affected by its attitude and this effect was especially prominent for a machine-like robot. On the other hand, merely repeating interactions was sufficient to reduce eeriness irrespective of a robot's embodiment. A...