In the Uncanny Valley
I stumbled into the uncanny valley not too long before I read about Anna Weiner’s book of the same name. The term refers to the sense of dislocation — weirdness — one feels on seeing something that seemed… almost real, but… not quite. It was coined to refer to our experiences with humanoid robots. To me the sensation seemed related to revulsion.
Biological evolution has designed us to feel a sense of unease when encountering something dangerous, even before we undestand it to be dangerous. Dis-ease, disease: the vomiting reflex triggered by coming upon a dead human might have been an evolutionary precaution to protect us from pathogens arising in decomposition; but it may be more. Crows and elephants also exhibit unease at encountering their own dead.
In the uncanny valley, I found the avatars that had occasioned emergence of the term. But as I wandered, I realized I had felt the same unease with other things: commercially soft cookies. Artificial strawberry flavor that kids seem to prefer to natural strawberries.
In the uncanny valley my path led to fakeness. “Fake news” was an unknown term a few years ago. Yes, it’s disinfomation, propaganda; and it’s been around for decades; but to confine it to the realms of our national public life is to sell it short. It is often now difficult to truly discern what is real in any number of spheres. (And what does “real” mean, anyway?) Photoshopping a person’s face onto another’s body — the early trick graphic — seems primitively crude now. Videos can show reality, or something entirely made up, the difference impossible to discern. Just the other day I felt the familiar unease watching a video made for the University of Wisconsin’s homecoming. The video showed what looked like a huge number of girls walking together toward the camera, touching hands, moving past the camera eye, more and more pairs of girls coming, touching, moving off … except .. .it was just 2 girls. Editing software had duplicated the animation, over and over, merging the images seamlessly. Perhaps the school did have a problem with an overwhelmingly white student body, but the video was no proof of that. It was fake.
There was the trumped-up photo of Elizabeth Warren. There was the video of Nancy Pelosi. In this age of fakery it was easy to assume the original was a fake, too — the one of her her ripping up a printout of the State of the Union speech while standing next to Trump as he delivered it. That was an actual true event, though. The one showing her tearing up the speech at the President’s address honoring a Tuskegee airman was the fake, they said — but other than choosing whom to believe, here seemed to be no way to tell.
There are halfhearted efforts to stop it all, but it continues, until it becomes accepted as normal. Fake news and real news are becoming interchangeable, as some have long hoped. It’s pretty much now accepted as normal. As Danny Hillis had suggested, we are getting used to the changes moving us into a world where more was artificial than not.
Artificial animals — that is, robots — are being given to people in memory care units of nursing homes. It isn’t clear whether people whose minds are already closing down experience the sensation of the not-quite-real that characterizes the uncanny valley. The stories say that the fake animals are calming, but who really knows? And now the “enthralling world” of virtual reality is being offered to them as well.
Depressed people are turning to chatbots to counsel them. Convenient, easily accessible confidential, these robots are programmed “to mimic human conversation and decision-making and primarily give advice, offer self-help guidance and companionship.” A Woebot costs less than talk with a real human, and the field is growing.
Uncanny valleys are appearing everywhere: Not just artificial humans that we can — somehow, on a gut level, perceive — but almost everything. Perceptible differences between artificial and “real” may be disappearing. “Real” may not even be a thing much longer.
Artificial general intelligence, superintelligence. Can the human mind be re-created in silicon? Nobody knows yet. There are the believers and nonbelievers, the distinction seeming to rest on what one believes “consciousness” is.
Noel Harari says, in his inimitable way, “Over the last century, as scientists opened up the Sapiens black box, they discovered there neither soul, nor free will, nor ‘self’ — but only genes, hormones and neurons that obey the same physical and chemical laws governing the rest of reality.” Daniel Dennett is in Harari’s camp: there is no inner essence, no “self”, no free will. Science, Dennett says, has “dismantled the wall between the organic and inorganic, turned the computer revolution from a purely mechanical affair into a biological cataclysm, and shifted authority from individual humans to networked algorithms.”
“Once we have a human-level artificial intelligence, there’s just no doubt that it will change the world.” Philosopher David Chalmers is in the camp with those who embrace the idea of the Singularity. A mathematician by training, he’s become one of the lunar lights of cognitive science and philosophy of mind. He’s also known as one of the “Four Horsemen of Atheism.” Chalmers’ understanding of what it will be like becoming an artificial — silicon — human is this: You’d “gradually replace your neurons, one at a time, with computer parts or upload them to a computer. You start as a fully biological system, and then you’re three-quarters biological and one-quarter silicon, and then half biological and half silicon, then one-quarter biological and three-quarters silicon, and finally you’re a fully silicon system. If you make it a functionally perfect simulation throughout, then you’re going to be there till the end still saying, ‘Yup, I’m still home!’ If it’s a proof, it’ll only be a proof for you. Someone else can still say, ‘I think you turned into a zombie.’”
What does “artificial” share with “artifice”?
