Uncanny Valley

"Yeah, I can fly!" - Iron Man (2008)

Iron Man is one of the greatest movies of our time. Not because Robert Downey Jr. plays an attractive engineer from MIT who is nick-named "Merchant of Death", but because it brings alive a character that we fondly imagined after spending hours underneath our blankets with flashlights and Marvel comic books.

Well, these stories of fiction have caught up with reality. The exoskeleton suit that enabled Tony Stark to fight with supernatural powers has already been invented in parts across the world. In fact, research studies involving humanoid robots are heavily funded. Their applications have been identified in the fields of military, assistive devices, social replacements and to develop superpowers for ordinary people. Superpowers, you ask? It has been said that much of this research is progressing towards building unconventional suits to arm the common man with insane amount of power we witness in superhero movies.

What is ironic however, is the hypothesis of the uncanny valley, first coined by Masahiro Mori. The origins of this concept can be found in the works of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud. The theory is that as a robot is made to look more like a human in appearance and function, the response from human beings will be positive. However, at a certain point this response will become that of a strong revulsion. As more advances are made on the product and the robot's characteristics become even less distinguishable from that of a man, the response once again turns positive. The valley results between "barely human" and "fully human" states of the robot.

The reasons for this valley have been attributed to mortality salience (strengthened fear of death), sorites paradox(stimuli with human and nonhuman traits undermine our sense of human), and a violation of human norms.

However, I believe that we all have experienced this valley already even without coming across these robotic engineering marvels. There are enough humans walking around this planet to instill the fear of death, undermine our sense of of human and question our belief system. Humans are threatened by other colleagues, jealous of friends, and always struggling towards that peak of power. How many times have we shut out our best friends because they can do something better than us? How many times have we abandoned people in our lives because they just don't serve a purpose anymore? How many times have we stepped on toes to climb that ladder of success? Unfortunately, I stand guilty!

These robots need to come around sooner, because with a common enemy at least our revulsion against each other might be minimized. Perhaps this futuristic concept is not too far into the future. But our encounter with the uncanny valley is definitely historic. We are not waiting to fall into this valley, because we're already buried deep. And when we fly with these super human robot systems, we can finally dig our way out!