Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you? And it's time for a text Stuff Tadbits episode. I hope you're ready for another spooky edition of tech Stuff for those of you listening from the future. I've been doing a few tangentially spooky episodes for the month of October and two thousand twenty two, and today I thought we would talk about the concept of the Uncanny Valley, and we're gonna look at sort of the hypothesis of the Uncanny Valley, as well as some criticisms and counter arguments related to the idea. Not that the uncanny isn't something that we experience, at least that feeling of uneasiness we experience when we encounter something that's said to be in the Uncanny Valley, but rather the actual concept of the valley itself, whether or not that's a valid idea. Before we can do any of that, we need to talk about what the uncanny Valley is, or what it's supposed to be, at least in general terms. The phrase comes from roboticist Massa Hiro Mori. He has made numerous contributions in the fields of robotics and in human robot interactions and responses, including human emotional response to robots, which is really what happens when you get to the heart of Uncanny Valley. So way back in nineteen seventy, More penned an article for a Japanese journal called Energy, and it was in this article that we got the phrase uncanny Valley. So Maury's observation was this, robots tend to get more appealing as they start to look more human like, but only up to a certain point. Once you go past that point, they become incredibly unappealing. You know. It could be to the point where it's not just that you have no emotional response, but you have a negative emotional response upon encountering the robot. It becomes creepy and disturbing. We have entire horror movies that are based off this. A very current example is the film Meagan m Three g a n You may have seen the trailer or maybe an animated gift from it where you see a child sized robot like it looks like a robot little girl, but with artificial eyes doing this this dance in a hallway, and a lot of people have talked about how it's kind of nightmare inducing. That plays on this concept of uncanny vale that when you reach a level that looks pretty human but at the same time as distinctly not human. There's something about it that is very much not human, and that's when it really turns you off. And then as you get closer to human again, once you get past this point, the emotional response improves. So in other words, you've got this continuum from not human at all, which is usually matched with little to no emotional response, to gradually becoming more and more human like with an improved emotional response, to getting almost but not quite humanlike, where you have a plunge in the emotional response, and then you get past this point and you get to the improvement again. So this is that that dip there, that's the uncanny valley. It's when robots appear to be strange and unsettling or uncanny as it were. Uh. This concept, of course extends beyond robotics. We also use it for stuff like computer generated characters. Remember way back in two thousand four with the film The Polar Express came out. If you're not familiar with the Polar Express, it's a computer animated film. Tom Hanks did the voice for it and has a character that looks like a creepy version of Tom Hanks in it, and the animators used live action references, including motion capture performances to kind of serve as the underlying animation for the characters in the film. Several reviewers praised the story, but a lot of them both positive and negative reviews, commented that the human characters in the film seemed off and a little bit creepy as a result, that it was kind of unsettling, especially to see their eyes move now right away with this approach to an uncanny valley idea, there is a bit of a problem of this general definition, and that's the fact that, you know, robots or computer generated characters appearances aren't really designed to be on a gradient like this, Like that was not necessarily the prime consideration. So if all artificial constructs, like if all computer animated characters and all robots ultimately were meant to have an appearance that was indistinguishable from a human or at least to look human, with you know, that being the end goal is to make it so that you couldn't tell the difference between artificial and real. Then we would have a pretty good basis for our thesis about the Uncanny Valley, right, because you would have this purposeful gradient there. But instead, you know, there are robots that are never meant to look human in appearance. That was never a consideration because it wasn't necessary for what the job that the robot was going to do. So it's a non factor. Right. The robots were designed to do something like to solve some sort of problem or to do some sort of task, and unless that happens to include to the the requirement to look like a human at the same time, there's no reason to make that part of the design process. Heck, we've seen this with various robot designs recently, where a lot of companies were looking at using robots with wheels instead of robots with legs, because legs are way more complicated to work out than wheels. You know, being able to make sure that the robot can balance and can move around without falling over these are non trivial challenges. So if there's no reason for the robot to have those those features, you tell build it into the robot. Right, If the robot doesn't need to move around at all, then it doesn't have legs or wheels or anything. It's stationary. So you know, a robot that's meant to quickly weld a dozen spots on a car chassis can look like a big old industrial arm that has a few points of articulation, or you do. You might have a robot that's just like this big stationary block that to you doesn't look like robot at all. Right, it doesn't have any features on it that screamed to you robot, but it is in fact an automated, repetitive machine designed to to do some task on its own. More or less. You might call it a robot by those definitions, but it doesn't look like what we think of when we hear the word robot. They may just be another element along an assembly line that helps produce some manufactured component, so they don't look human. But they also don't creep us out right. We don't look at these giant industrial robots and feel them like having an unsettling uh influence on us. We have a non emotional response to most of them. So it's just a it's just a thing. It's just like a tool. It's like if you saw a hammer or a screwdriver, you're not likely to have some sort of emotional response to that. So maybe instead of just grouping all robots together and saying they fall along this uncanny valley, we should really focus on a subset of robots, ones that incorporate elements of human like appearance. So that would count out stuff like room buzz. You wouldn't put your roomba in that category, right, Your industrial robots also wouldn't go in there. Um And I'm not saying, by the way, that your robotic vacuum cleaner isn't cute. I'm just saying that for the purposes of an uncanny valley narrative or conversation, it doesn't really fit. But let's get back to Masahiro Mori. He created a pretty simple graph, a line chart with an X axis and a y axis. So the X axis the horizontal axis he wrote human likeness, So the further to the right you got along this axis, the more like a human the robot would appear. The y axis, the vertical axis is the affinity or the emotional response, like from no response to positive and if you dip below the line, like below the x axis, you go to negative response. Right, So this is how he would plot robots. He would argue that industrial robots score low both in human likeness and in affinity, that they don't look like humans and we don't tend to have an emotional response to them. So if you were to plot points on this graph, it would be pretty close to the x axis, pretty close to the y axis, so it would be the low part of the line. But then you get into things like toy robots, right, and these toys may look slightly more like a human than industrial robots do. They might be anthropomorphic, they might be bipedal um. But you would never mistake a simple toy robot for a human. You would just recognize the human like features, and our affinity goes up, our emotional response starts to be more positive compared to say, industrial robots, presumably because they look more like people or humans. So we have a slight upward slope of our line that we begin to plot. All right, before we get too far into this slope in this line, let's take a quick break. We'll come right back and talk a little more about Unkenny Valley. Okay, where we left off, we were saying that toy robots are slightly more humanlike in appearance than say, industrial robots, and that we have a more positive emotional response to them. So, according to Maury's graph, once we get past the fifty point where uh we start to really approach human likeness, we still see improvement in affinity. Right as robots get to look more and more human like, we start to be more and more positive in our acceptance of them. So think about like robots that have very expressive eyes. For example, they don't necessarily look like a human, but think of like a robot that has a vaguely kind of human shape, with like a torso and a head and stuff, and they have eyes that are large and appear to be expressive. Those are the kind of things that we tend to respond positively too. But then as we start to make the robots look more and more human like, maybe we put an artificial skin on them, We might put a wig on them to give them hair. We might make their eyes appear to be more human, and those eyes may or may not house camera, who knows. We may give them the ability to make certain expressions. Then we start to reach a point where we can get to that negative reaction, the affinity would dip below zero. So on our little chart, the slope now goes all the way down below the X axis and then bottoms out somewhere around there where we get to some horrifying monstrosity that just makes us wet ourselves when we look at it. Now, once you get past that point where the robot or artificial human is beyond that creepy factor, the line starts to go back up again, and eventually it overtakes where we left off before the depth, so that we eventually start seeking out experiences with those robots, or we seek out, you know, films that use that kind of computer animation because we find it really appealing. So it's no longer that there's this gap, there's this like perception that the thing is unnatural and it bothers us um. One example I saw using Morey's graph, his line chart was on the far side where things are going up again, where we're starting to see improvement is the bun rock Who puppet so Bunarrock Who is a form of puppet theater that dates back hundreds of years in Japan and in traditional bun rock who you have three puppeteers who control each figure. You have a primary puppeteer who is in charge of the character's head movements as well as their right hand. You have a secondary puppeteer who controls the left hand, and you have the third puppeteer responsible for the legs and feet. By the way, typically in the history of bun Rock who if you were to train in that kind of puppetry, you would start as someone who would manipulate feet and legs, work your way up to being the left hand, and then ultimately, if you were really skilled, you could graduate up to the point where you could control of puppets head and right hand. This art form obviously requires very careful coordination between the three puppeteers, and really accomplished performers can create incredible lifelike movements like it is captivating to watch bun Rock Ou theater. But I think the inclusion of bun Rock WU on the positive side, like Past the Uncanny Valley, demonstrates that there's something of an element of cultural and social factors that can affect our emotional reaction when we see something that we would describe as falling into the uncanny valley. Because I think, at least for some Western audiences, watching a bun rock Who performance might be a little unsettling. Certainly, the puppets can sometimes inspire that creepy feeling of themselves. So because it is not part of my culture, this this kind of bit theater. Even though I've seen these performances, it's not something that is coming from my culture or something I was exposed to a lot as a child. I find bun Rocky puppets to be a little unsettling. In fact, I'll never forget when I visited my sister, a puppeteer at the Center for Puppetry Arts, which is here in Atlanta. They have an amazing museum, and I visited my sister, and it was after hours, but they let me in and said, go ahead and you can walk through the museum if you like. This is with all the main lights turned off, like they had lighting, but it was not the same lighting they would have during the day. So I'm in this dim area filled with puppets all staring at me, and it was very creepy. There were also puppets of varying degrees of human like, some of them, like bun rock Who, puppets, some of them more abstract. It was a really creepy experience. Now, my point here is that the Uncanny Valley might best describe a feeling you get upon encountering something that seems both humanlike and alien at the same time. It doesn't necessarily describe a continuum that goes from not human at all two indistinguishable from human. That that is possibly the wrong way to look at this, right, that it's not necessarily things are getting better, Things are getting better, Things are getting better, woe, things are really terrible. Things are getting better again, because again, it all depends on what the robots built for, what the computer generated character is made for, and how it performs. I think it's fair to say that I experienced a similar unsettling feeling when I watched early videos of Boston Dynamics robots, you know, those four legged robots. They looked kind of like they were moving like an animal and kind of like they weren't, And that was really kind of an unsettling experience. And they look nothing like humans. Right, So I am, by no means an expert when it comes to subjects like robotics or psychology. So I fully admit that my hypothesis is coming without the benefit of expertise, right I. I can only say from what I've researched, And it may well be that we can describe artificial beings appearances as falling on this continuum that includes the Uncanny Valley. But I think there are other factors and variables at play here, mostly regarding the gap between an artificial beings behavior and appearance and the behavior and appearance of the real analog. And it might well be that younger generations will experience less of a sense of the Uncanny Valley because they will spend more of their lives around artificial beings, either in their entertainment or in the real world around them. So it may be that the Uncanny Valley will gradually kind of fade away, not because this continuum was solved, that we suddenly jumped past this perceived gap, but that the experience is no longer as foreign or alien of the people who are experiencing it as it is to older generations like like mine. So yeah, that's kind of a take on Uncanny Valley. I really do think that if you do have that those subtle gaps, like especially around eye movement, things like that you can look and say this looks photo realistic. This looks like a really well done video, Like it looks like an actual person, except there's something off about the eyes, either the reflectiveness of them, the wetness of the eyes, the movement of the eyes. That's really where I see a lot of that following through. There's also a lot to be said about subtle facial expressions that aren't always captured in computer generated versions of characters, where it just seems a little too flat. But anyway, I thought that it would be fun to kind of talk about Uncanny Valley and where that idea came from. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it if you would like to let me know, or maybe you've got a suggestion for a future episode. There's a couple of ways you can get in touch. One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download and use. You can navigate to tech stuff in the little search bar. There's a little microphone icon. You can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know if you would like me to play it in a future episode and let me know that way, Or you can get in touch on Twitter the handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from i Heeart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you? And it's time for a text Stuff Tadbits episode. I hope you're ready for another spooky edition of tech Stuff for those of you listening from the future. I've been doing a few tangentially spooky episodes for the month of October and two thousand twenty two, and today I thought we would talk about the concept of the Uncanny Valley, and we're gonna look at sort of the hypothesis of the Uncanny Valley, as well as some criticisms and counter arguments related to the idea. Not that the uncanny isn't something that we experience, at least that feeling of uneasiness we experience when we encounter something that's said to be in the Uncanny Valley, but rather the actual concept of the valley itself, whether or not that's a valid idea. Before we can do any of that, we need to talk about what the uncanny Valley is, or what it's supposed to be, at least in general terms. The phrase comes from roboticist Massa Hiro Mori. He has made numerous contributions in the fields of robotics and in human robot interactions and responses, including human emotional response to robots, which is really what happens when you get to the heart of Uncanny Valley. So way back in nineteen seventy, More penned an article for a Japanese journal called Energy, and it was in this article that we got the phrase uncanny Valley. So Maury's observation was this, robots tend to get more appealing as they start to look more human like, but only up to a certain point. Once you go past that point, they become incredibly unappealing. You know. It could be to the point where it's not just that you have no emotional response, but you have a negative emotional response upon encountering the robot. It becomes creepy and disturbing. We have entire horror movies that are based off this. A very current example is the film Meagan m Three g a n You may have seen the trailer or maybe an animated gift from it where you see a child sized robot like it looks like a robot little girl, but with artificial eyes doing this this dance in a hallway, and a lot of people have talked about how it's kind of nightmare inducing. That plays on this concept of uncanny vale that when you reach a level that looks pretty human but at the same time as distinctly not human. There's something about it that is very much not human, and that's when it really turns you off. And then as you get closer to human again, once you get past this point, the emotional response improves. So in other words, you've got this continuum from not human at all, which is usually matched with little to no emotional response, to gradually becoming more and more human like with an improved emotional response, to getting almost but not quite humanlike, where you have a plunge in the emotional response, and then you get past this point and you get to the improvement again. So this is that that dip there, that's the uncanny valley. It's when robots appear to be strange and unsettling or uncanny as it were. Uh. This concept, of course extends beyond robotics. We also use it for stuff like computer generated characters. Remember way back in two thousand four with the film The Polar Express came out. If you're not familiar with the Polar Express, it's a computer animated film. Tom Hanks did the voice for it and has a character that looks like a creepy version of Tom Hanks in it, and the animators used live action references, including motion capture performances to kind of serve as the underlying animation for the characters in the film. Several reviewers praised the story, but a lot of them both positive and negative reviews, commented that the human characters in the film seemed off and a little bit creepy as a result, that it was kind of unsettling, especially to see their eyes move now right away with this approach to an uncanny valley idea, there is a bit of a problem of this general definition, and that's the fact that, you know, robots or computer generated characters appearances aren't really designed to be on a gradient like this, Like that was not necessarily the prime consideration. So if all artificial constructs, like if all computer animated characters and all robots ultimately were meant to have an appearance that was indistinguishable from a human or at least to look human, with you know, that being the end goal is to make it so that you couldn't tell the difference between artificial and real. Then we would have a pretty good basis for our thesis about the Uncanny Valley, right, because you would have this purposeful gradient there. But instead, you know, there are robots that are never meant to look human in appearance. That was never a consideration because it wasn't necessary for what the job that the robot was going to do. So it's a non factor. Right. The robots were designed to do something like to solve some sort of problem or to do some sort of task, and unless that happens to include to the the requirement to look like a human at the same time, there's no reason to make that part of the design process. Heck, we've seen this with various robot designs recently, where a lot of companies were looking at using robots with wheels instead of robots with legs, because legs are way more complicated to work out than wheels. You know, being able to make sure that the robot can balance and can move around without falling over these are non trivial challenges. So if there's no reason for the robot to have those those features, you tell build it into the robot. Right, If the robot doesn't need to move around at all, then it doesn't have legs or wheels or anything. It's stationary. So you know, a robot that's meant to quickly weld a dozen spots on a car chassis can look like a big old industrial arm that has a few points of articulation, or you do. You might have a robot that's just like this big stationary block that to you doesn't look like robot at all. Right, it doesn't have any features on it that screamed to you robot, but it is in fact an automated, repetitive machine designed to to do some task on its own. More or less. You might call it a robot by those definitions, but it doesn't look like what we think of when we hear the word robot. They may just be another element along an assembly line that helps produce some manufactured component, so they don't look human. But they also don't creep us out right. We don't look at these giant industrial robots and feel them like having an unsettling uh influence on us. We have a non emotional response to most of them. So it's just a it's just a thing. It's just like a tool. It's like if you saw a hammer or a screwdriver, you're not likely to have some sort of emotional response to that. So maybe instead of just grouping all robots together and saying they fall along this uncanny valley, we should really focus on a subset of robots, ones that incorporate elements of human like appearance. So that would count out stuff like room buzz. You wouldn't put your roomba in that category, right, Your industrial robots also wouldn't go in there. Um And I'm not saying, by the way, that your robotic vacuum cleaner isn't cute. I'm just saying that for the purposes of an uncanny valley narrative or conversation, it doesn't really fit. But let's get back to Masahiro Mori. He created a pretty simple graph, a line chart with an X axis and a y axis. So the X axis the horizontal axis he wrote human likeness, So the further to the right you got along this axis, the more like a human the robot would appear. The y axis, the vertical axis is the affinity or the emotional response, like from no response to positive and if you dip below the line, like below the x axis, you go to negative response. Right, So this is how he would plot robots. He would argue that industrial robots score low both in human likeness and in affinity, that they don't look like humans and we don't tend to have an emotional response to them. So if you were to plot points on this graph, it would be pretty close to the x axis, pretty close to the y axis, so it would be the low part of the line. But then you get into things like toy robots, right, and these toys may look slightly more like a human than industrial robots do. They might be anthropomorphic, they might be bipedal um. But you would never mistake a simple toy robot for a human. You would just recognize the human like features, and our affinity goes up, our emotional response starts to be more positive compared to say, industrial robots, presumably because they look more like people or humans. So we have a slight upward slope of our line that we begin to plot. All right, before we get too far into this slope in this line, let's take a quick break. We'll come right back and talk a little more about Unkenny Valley. Okay, where we left off, we were saying that toy robots are slightly more humanlike in appearance than say, industrial robots, and that we have a more positive emotional response to them. So, according to Maury's graph, once we get past the fifty point where uh we start to really approach human likeness, we still see improvement in affinity. Right as robots get to look more and more human like, we start to be more and more positive in our acceptance of them. So think about like robots that have very expressive eyes. For example, they don't necessarily look like a human, but think of like a robot that has a vaguely kind of human shape, with like a torso and a head and stuff, and they have eyes that are large and appear to be expressive. Those are the kind of things that we tend to respond positively too. But then as we start to make the robots look more and more human like, maybe we put an artificial skin on them, We might put a wig on them to give them hair. We might make their eyes appear to be more human, and those eyes may or may not house camera, who knows. We may give them the ability to make certain expressions. Then we start to reach a point where we can get to that negative reaction, the affinity would dip below zero. So on our little chart, the slope now goes all the way down below the X axis and then bottoms out somewhere around there where we get to some horrifying monstrosity that just makes us wet ourselves when we look at it. Now, once you get past that point where the robot or artificial human is beyond that creepy factor, the line starts to go back up again, and eventually it overtakes where we left off before the depth, so that we eventually start seeking out experiences with those robots, or we seek out, you know, films that use that kind of computer animation because we find it really appealing. So it's no longer that there's this gap, there's this like perception that the thing is unnatural and it bothers us um. One example I saw using Morey's graph, his line chart was on the far side where things are going up again, where we're starting to see improvement is the bun rock Who puppet so Bunarrock Who is a form of puppet theater that dates back hundreds of years in Japan and in traditional bun rock who you have three puppeteers who control each figure. You have a primary puppeteer who is in charge of the character's head movements as well as their right hand. You have a secondary puppeteer who controls the left hand, and you have the third puppeteer responsible for the legs and feet. By the way, typically in the history of bun Rock who if you were to train in that kind of puppetry, you would start as someone who would manipulate feet and legs, work your way up to being the left hand, and then ultimately, if you were really skilled, you could graduate up to the point where you could control of puppets head and right hand. This art form obviously requires very careful coordination between the three puppeteers, and really accomplished performers can create incredible lifelike movements like it is captivating to watch bun Rock Ou theater. But I think the inclusion of bun Rock WU on the positive side, like Past the Uncanny Valley, demonstrates that there's something of an element of cultural and social factors that can affect our emotional reaction when we see something that we would describe as falling into the uncanny valley. Because I think, at least for some Western audiences, watching a bun rock Who performance might be a little unsettling. Certainly, the puppets can sometimes inspire that creepy feeling of themselves. So because it is not part of my culture, this this kind of bit theater. Even though I've seen these performances, it's not something that is coming from my culture or something I was exposed to a lot as a child. I find bun Rocky puppets to be a little unsettling. In fact, I'll never forget when I visited my sister, a puppeteer at the Center for Puppetry Arts, which is here in Atlanta. They have an amazing museum, and I visited my sister, and it was after hours, but they let me in and said, go ahead and you can walk through the museum if you like. This is with all the main lights turned off, like they had lighting, but it was not the same lighting they would have during the day. So I'm in this dim area filled with puppets all staring at me, and it was very creepy. There were also puppets of varying degrees of human like, some of them, like bun rock Who, puppets, some of them more abstract. It was a really creepy experience. Now, my point here is that the Uncanny Valley might best describe a feeling you get upon encountering something that seems both humanlike and alien at the same time. It doesn't necessarily describe a continuum that goes from not human at all two indistinguishable from human. That that is possibly the wrong way to look at this, right, that it's not necessarily things are getting better, Things are getting better, Things are getting better, woe, things are really terrible. Things are getting better again, because again, it all depends on what the robots built for, what the computer generated character is made for, and how it performs. I think it's fair to say that I experienced a similar unsettling feeling when I watched early videos of Boston Dynamics robots, you know, those four legged robots. They looked kind of like they were moving like an animal and kind of like they weren't, And that was really kind of an unsettling experience. And they look nothing like humans. Right, So I am, by no means an expert when it comes to subjects like robotics or psychology. So I fully admit that my hypothesis is coming without the benefit of expertise, right I. I can only say from what I've researched, And it may well be that we can describe artificial beings appearances as falling on this continuum that includes the Uncanny Valley. But I think there are other factors and variables at play here, mostly regarding the gap between an artificial beings behavior and appearance and the behavior and appearance of the real analog. And it might well be that younger generations will experience less of a sense of the Uncanny Valley because they will spend more of their lives around artificial beings, either in their entertainment or in the real world around them. So it may be that the Uncanny Valley will gradually kind of fade away, not because this continuum was solved, that we suddenly jumped past this perceived gap, but that the experience is no longer as foreign or alien of the people who are experiencing it as it is to older generations like like mine. So yeah, that's kind of a take on Uncanny Valley. I really do think that if you do have that those subtle gaps, like especially around eye movement, things like that you can look and say this looks photo realistic. This looks like a really well done video, Like it looks like an actual person, except there's something off about the eyes, either the reflectiveness of them, the wetness of the eyes, the movement of the eyes. That's really where I see a lot of that following through. There's also a lot to be said about subtle facial expressions that aren't always captured in computer generated versions of characters, where it just seems a little too flat. But anyway, I thought that it would be fun to kind of talk about Uncanny Valley and where that idea came from. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it if you would like to let me know, or maybe you've got a suggestion for a future episode. There's a couple of ways you can get in touch. One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download and use. You can navigate to tech stuff in the little search bar. There's a little microphone icon. You can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know if you would like me to play it in a future episode and let me know that way, Or you can get in touch on Twitter the handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from i Heeart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.