Creepy


On my morning bike ride there’s this great house among the glimpses of suburbia that I get from the bush track. It looks so bizarrely out of place among the brick veneer and fake Federation that I can’t imagine what its builders were thinking…

Violet Towne doesn’t quite understand why I’m so enamoured of it, but then she doesn’t see it like I do…

At last! The Age of Robots has arrived! As we stride into 2009, Canadian roboticist Trung Le unveils Aiko, the anatomically correct fembot* with which he hopes to take the world by storm.

Anatomically Correct?

Le boasts that Aiko can greet, shake hands, read out loud, perform mathematical calculations and give the weather forecast, accomplishments one could not fail to find useful in an anatomically correct companion. I urge you to go here and watch a demonstration video of Aiko in action (no Polanski & Atlas, not that kind of action).

The picture to the right shows Le examining Aiko for anatomical correctness. Seriously!

“I do not like it when you touch my breasts,” Aiko responds rather petulantly, as she spastically swats in the general direction of Le like a debutante paralytic on Blackberry Nip. This is disturbing on so many levels, not the least of which is that Le has referred to Aiko elsewhere as his ‘daughter’. Aiko’s general demeanour is also rather unsettling, making public appearances as she does in a wheelchair, with one hand bandaged in a black mitten, and the other flapping around disconcertingly like a rubber glove filled with jelly. I offer up my usual observation regarding robots: what Aiko lacks in the reality stakes she more than makes up for in creepy factor. I would cast Aiko in a horror movie in a flash (Ring IV, maybe, where Samara returns to inhabit the boneless body of a monotonally speaking crippled Japanese Michael Jackson fan with Tourette’s).

And while Aiko may be considered by some to be the pinnacle of anatomical correctness, her language skills could use a little work: “Why did you do that for?” she asks, when Le gives her a Chinese burn (you think I’m making this up don’t you?). I hope her weather forecasts are more accurate than her grammar.

A Realistic Robot

Meanwhile, in China (home of all kinds of sensational technical breakthroughs), DIY roboticists Wang Wenrong and Wu Yulu are building ‘an army’ of home-made robots for purposes unspecified. Given that the mechanical marvels are said to be able to serve drinks, light cigarettes, bow, weave, sing, play musical instruments and scale walls, we can only speculate about what these Chinese tinkerers have in mind for their militia of automaton stormtroopers. And when we learn that some of them are being fashioned in the likeness of Hillary Clinton (see the anatomically-correct spitting image at left, having her uterus adjusted by Wang Wenrong), well, we can’t help but feel a little uneasy.

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*I don’t know about you, but for me the use of the term ‘anatomically correct’ in the context of female mannequins (robotic aspirations aside) just sounds like a euphemism for ‘sex doll’.

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A couple of posts back I mentioned Reborn Baby Dolls in the context of The Uncanny Valley and the problem of distinguishing robots from humans.

Well, Comment Number 22 on that post is very interesting because it is conceivable that it might just possibly have been made by a robot:

August 1st, 2008 at 10:19 pm

Tracy adds:

I will say that reborn dolls are the most realistic looking dolls I’ve ever encountered and dealt with, but don’t you think they are as creepy as they are cute? As mentioned before the ones with the open eyes can give a person the chills.

We can certainly entertain the idea that Tracy’s ‘human’ quotient is converging on robot. We know for sure that she is insincere, since her link takes us back to a Reborn Baby Doll site (well, it did before I made it go somewhere much more appropriate. Tsk. No free advertising of your creepy hobby on The Cow, Tracy).

See, this is the problem with the Uncanny Valley; bots, when approaching any level of ‘humanness’ are likely to appear at first as mad people. Or at the very least, untrustworthy people. I am unable to tell whether Tracy is real or a clever bot that has just done a search for Reborn Baby references and mangled some of my words to make it seem as if a real person has commented, embedding a link back to RBD site. Read it again. Does it make any sense to you? The grammar is wrong and the ‘sense’ of the statement is wrong (she’s agreeing with me, but not really…). Additionally, the cadence of the comment is very similar to some kinds of spam I’ve received – and believe me, I’ve read enough spam to get a very good feeling for it.

OK – show of hands – who thinks Tracy is a real person? And now, who thinks Tracy should make some further ‘guest’ appearances on The Cow?

Stillborn...?

OK, as we’re on the subject of the Uncanny Valley, let’s drift over to the phenomenon of Reborn Baby Dolls. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look here. This is a Reborn Baby Doll web ring. Kick back. Spend a few minutes browsing around. And be prepared to be really creeped out.

This is a huge community of people who are devoted to making, buying and selling minutely detailed facsimiles of babies. I’m not a biological parent, so I may not be the best one to judge, but these ‘dolls’ really give me the willies. They don’t say ‘cute lifelike baby’ to me – they say ‘DEAD baby’. I suppose the makers might argue that they are sleeping babies, but I would counter that they never wake up and are therefore back in the category of DEAD. Especially the ones with their eyes open.

If you had one of these things in your house, then I can guarantee that there’s one sound you’d never want to hear and that’s the pitter-patter of tiny feet.

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(Seriously – mothers who are reading – do you find this concept cute or weird? I’m really interested.)

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Uncanny!

You may remember that in my post about the Coming of the Robots a little while back I talked about Hiroshi Ishiguro’s actroids and the inventor’s attempt to give his automatons a realistic human appearance. I penned the words:

…the closer these things come to having the semblance of humanness, the greater is my desire to punch them.

As I wrote in that post, my feeling is that there is something more disconcerting about the almost human appearance of these robots than there would be about having a clumsy metal quite obviously artificial ‘Robbie’ as a manservant.

Well I discovered today that there is in fact some interesting thinking devoted to exactly this idea, and even better, a cool term.

It is called The Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley hypothesis was advanced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori and basically states that, as robots develop and become increasingly ‘human’ in appearance, humans start to find it easier to accept and interact with them. However, there comes a certain point beyond which acceptance gives way, quite abruptly, to revulsion. Then (Mori’s hypothesis asserts) as the facsimile approaches even greater realism (that is, the ‘ideal’ human form) acceptance increases once more to ‘human’ level tolerance.

If you viewed the videos of Ishiguro’s actroids you’ll understand exactly what the Uncanny Valley idea encompasses – these robots are creepy and disturbing and there’s no way I’d want one lurking in my house after dark. Or before dark for that matter. So much so that I’m even wary of Mori’s use of the term ‘Valley’ in his hypothesis – from where I stand it looks more like an Uncanny Grand Canyon.

Mori has been criticised on this very point – there is of course no evidence so far that robots will become sufficiently lifelike to make the Uncanny Valley anything more than an Uncanny Precipice.

In fact Mori’s whole concept has been called into question by commentators such as US roboticist and sculptor David Hanson and Swiss artificial intelligence scientist Dario Floreano* who go so far to say that it is pseudoscience. Well, it may be true that there is little actual science behind the idea of the Uncanny Valley as yet, but to my mind at least it makes good common sense that we instinctively don’t lend our trust to something that could be human but also might not be. It’s not a new concept to humans in any way – it has been the subject of paranoid science fiction for decades, and before that an idea that surfaces in folk tales and myths as far back as we have records.

As I said in We Are the Robots, when we used to have the old electronic ‘cut-up’ voices on telephone answering services, it was clear that we were dealing with machines. In my opinion, as superficial semblance to machines decreases (in these ‘voice robots’ at least) then we expect, quite correctly I think, that their behaviour should increase in realism at the same rate or better. And as much as I respect the obviously informed opinions of people such as Hanson and Floreano I think that the Uncanny Valley will persist until such times as robots are indistinguishable from humans.

In other words, when the androids get as convincingly lifelike as Rachel in Blade Runner, then maybe The Uncanny Valley might start to look more like a Grassy Meadow.

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*Floreano has an MA in Visual Psychophysics. Oh, how much do I want one of those!

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While we’re on the subject of religious personal hygiene products… this just in courtesy of JR:

Nun Breath

You can buy it here. Confuse Creationists today! Wear the Pope’s Cologne and have breath like Mother Teresa, whilst being an atheist!

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I’m pretty sure this is a joke. Thing is, with religion, you just can’t tell.

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