Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Unporny Valley: Humanoid Sex Dolls and Zombie Bukkake

Susannah Breslin, in her blog The Reverse Cowgirl, has a fascinating adaptation of the Uncanny Valley hypothesis.

From the Wikipedia article:

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's, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

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.
This image is provided:

Breslin's beautiful detournement into the "Unporny Valley":

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