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The Future Feels Just Like the Real Thing, Whether You Like it Or Not
We haven’t arrived in the Golden Age of Robotics just yet. They still scare us too much. It’s the rising sense of panic in our chests when we’re confronted by the fascinating and horrifying creations of roboticists like Dave Hanson, a former Disney Imagineer whose “Sophia” played Rock, Paper, Scissors on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Or the double, triple, quadruple takes we’ll give the $200,000 Geminoid-DK android, modeled after Danish professor Henrik Scharfe and produced by Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories, creators of the extra-creepy communications robot Telenoid.
That creepy feeling is likely thanks to something called the “uncanny valley,” which Matt McCullen from Realbotix and creator of the Real Doll (the most popular brand of sex doll) describes as “the new experience of seeing something that strongly resembles a human being, but that has qualities that are obvious so you can tell it’s not a person.” Basically, people feel a certain way about things that look sufficiently like themselves, and when we realize it’s in response to something that isn’t really…
