I stumbled upon what has to be the most interesting idea. Its called the “Uncanny Valley” and I will quote here from Wikipedia:
“The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970….
Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.[2]
This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely-human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.[2]“
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley
I know; awesome. I was stunned at the explanations that this theory provides. I couldn’t find much more on Masahiro Mori aside from the article. He had wrote a book called Buddha In The Robot, and I will have to check that out. On YouTube there is an in depth analysis of the “Uncanny Valley” by Karl F. MacDorman from the 2007 NMC Summer Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. Check out the 6 part lecture here:
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