The term “uncanny valley” was coined by the Japanese engineer Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe the sense of eerie unease that we the human viewers feel when confronted with an artificial machine created in our own image, one that comes very close, but not quite, to the real. It is the double-take point at which empathy turns to disquiet and then revulsion.
While the vast majority of the machines we’re creating to serve us today are not created in our own or nature’s image – with android replicants still more a quirky cul-de-sac of futuristic fantasy – the machine is now hidden in another way, with our technological assistants likely to be intangible, remotely controlled bits of kit – take GPS guidance systems for example. Quite often now you ask yourself: where is the machine? And who is it serving?
Even when the machines we rely on appear comfortingly domestic and present – take our smart phones – we haven’t the faintest idea how they work, yet trust them with the most intimate details of our lives, knowing they are just interface points in vast networks designed to support, but also to track and monitor us.
This is the new uncanny valley: it is the feeling we have about the idea of being chauffeured around in a driverless car; in watching an industrial robot build something with more precision than the most skilled craftsman; in realising that we have developed an emotional attachment to a machine, given it a pet name and mourned its loss when it dies as if it were a friend. It is the fear of impending technological singularity; the growing zone of discomfort within the complex/systems of machines and technology into which our lives are becoming embedded, systems that are creating and building new environments – like smart cities – into which we fit: systems unknoweable by any one individual yet to which we are fast becoming so inured that we no longer perceive them to be artificial.
Both physical and invisible, the robots are here to stay. We made them to help us, not to make ourselves helpless. But a good tool is only useful if you make the effort to understand what it is and how to use it. We are the humans. Can we still trust ourselves to be in charge of our own futures? (sl)
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