Knowing that the uncanny valley began as a groundless thought experiment, and has inspired a range of more self-contained experiments, doesn't completely invalidate it. It simply means the valley has grown up, and that casual references to it are only slightly off-base. After all, there's still the matter of the uncanny's power to horrify us and validate our fears of robots. If machines can trigger cognitive dissonance in the human brain, roboticists must continue to carefully tweak their creations, to avoid individual revulsion and even a society-wide blowback. That would be a major concern for the designers and manufacturers of the coming generation of social robots.
Read Erik Sofge's article titled, The Truth About Robots and the Uncanny Valley: Analysis in Popular Mechanics online.
No comments:
Post a Comment