Uncanny Valleys

I did this piece in Wired about why it’s impossible to do animation of the [human] face. They can make perfect animations of hands and crowds and so forth, of people walking, but they keep on bumping against the wall with the face, and they can’t do it. And one of the theories is that it is possible that it is theoretically impossible to do. And the great guy in this field is a Japanese Buddhist roboticist named Masahiro Mori. He has the notion of the “uncanny valley.” Which is basically that you can take a—if you make a robot that’s 70 percent lifelike, that’s fantastic. 80 percent, incredible. 90 percent unbelievable. 95 percent, people are going crazy how great this robot is. 96 percent, it’s a disaster. Because it’s entered the uncanny valley. Which is to say that a 95-percent lifelike robot is an incredibly lifelike robot. And a 96-percent lifelike robot is a human being with something wrong.

--Lawrence Weschler, during a long interview with Robert Birnbaum (who is, I would argue, not entirely unlike a 96-percent lifelike robot). The Wired article Weschler references is here. His book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder is one of my favorites. Everything That Rises is truly capable of walloping the way you see everything.