Thoughts: Race and the Uncanny Valley
Black robots are scarce. Can the violent path of Social Darwinism be written as a response to the uncanniness of colonized “primitives”? Is it only a historical accident that we don’t feel comfortable creating black robots?
I see Masahiro Mori’s pseudo-scientific article on the Uncanny Valley as responding to the commercialization of uncanny objects; namely, robots (broadly construed). The ability to sell robots has led to the need to fine tune our understanding of what robots consumers will buy, and what robots people will buy is dependent not only on how useful those robots are, but also how comfortable we are with them. In Mori’s case of a prosthetic hand, in fact, our comfort with it is a factor of its usefulness.
This bold impulse to place uncanniness on a continuous (numerical!) spectrum, however, isn’t unprecedented. (I am leaving aside, here, whether we are even justified in measuring something as subjective and intangible as uncanniness.) Social Darwinism — which sought to create a scientifically founded hierarchy of races — did exactly the same thing. The most famous spectrum (below) puts a “Negro” between “Apollo Belvidere” and a “Young Chimpanzee” based on skull characteristics.

Race is uncanny. The very idea of race as we now conceive it was made to deal with the uncanniness of vastly different peoples seen by white colonizers. The uncanny is, by definition, a threat to our identity; it is the familiar made unfamiliar. Beyond the fact that the intelligence of black Africans (for example) was ignored, the very idea of it was a threat to the identity of their white colonizers. It is uncanny to think of a people equally intelligent to one’s own behaving according to different moral and social norms, structuring themselves according to different principles, and espousing vastly different values.
But why measure the uncanny? Or rather, why use the uncanny as a measurement of humanity? (Which is, in essence, what the Social Darwinists were measuring.) I believe it has to do with our comfort with numbers, science, etc. Once we can put something on a spectrum, it is known, packaged, ordered. In other words, it is controlled. With Social Darwinism, race was no longer uncanny because we could point to our spectrum and the numbers (not I!) will say They are less human than We. It took the uncanniness out of Colonization. Metricizing uncanniness legitimized it; it insulated white Colonizers from their decision to ascribe humanity (aka moral worth) according to their feeling of the uncanny.
We should ask, then, what is being legitimized in Mori’s piece? Is there anything? At first glance the answer might be, no. Robots don’t have moral worth. (A question for another day.) But then again, might we not also be indirectly legitimizing other distinctions, say, by creating robots that are ‘almost female’ by highlighting aspects of women’s bodies? Why are we okay with that? Would it not feel just a little too uncanny (to put it lightly) to create a ‘black’ robot and pretend we aren’t just trying to relive our Colonial past?