Robots, Love, Babies

Kenji, a third-generation humanoid robot, was originally programmed to emulate the human emotion of love, but ended up emulating dependence and fear of abandonment instead.

"After some limited environmental conditioning, Kenji first demonstrated love by bonding with a a stuffed doll in his enclosure, which he would embrace for hours at a time... Researchers attributed this behavior to his programmed qualities of devotion and empathy and called the experiment a success.

...

"The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly."

Nope, looks like Kenji wasn't displaying devotion and empathy at all.

Interestingly, his behavior is surprisingly similar to the first steps of social-emotional development in babies. At around 8-10 months, babies begin to show signs of human attachment, mostly in the form of separation anxiety, and only later do they acquire the capacity of empathy and an understanding of social rules.

So maybe Kenji just needs to grow up?

The story gets funnier:

"The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji."

Would have loved to see that. You can read more about Kenji here.

Sci-Fi Prosthetics

A prosthetic limb that looks like it came right out of a sci-fi movie? On a girl clearly giving someone the come-hither eyes?



This may be the stuff of dreams for a certain demographic raised on fantasy books and video games. But while the urge to fill this post with thinly veiled cyber-porn allusions is great, what came to mind when I read about this is in fact the theme of this blog. This is a perfect instance of the uncanny valley phenomenon.

A whole lot of thought has gone into making prosthetic limbs look natural and lifelike, but they often remain eerily creepy. Much creepier, as it turns out, than this sci-fi inspired model, a conceptual design by Hans Alexander Huseklepp at AHO, which makes no pretense whatsoever of resembling a flesh-and-blood human limb.

The uncanny valley theory would suggest that this is because this sci-fi prosthesis is sufficiently non-humanlike, that we zero in on its human-like qualities instead. Quite the opposite occurs for traditional prostheses. Indeed, with their skin-colored plastic and fake fingernails, traditional prostheses fall right down the uncanny valley, that eerie place where making something more humanlike actually causes a distinctly more negative human response.

As of now, this design is merely conceptual, but click here to read more about the thought process behind it.

The Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that as a robot is made more humanlike, the emotional response from a human to the robot becomes increasingly positive, until a point of human-likeness is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-human, then the humanlike characteristics tend to stand out, generating empathy. But if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

Check out the wikipedia entry here.

The uncanny valley is one of my favorite theories. And this blog is about my own uncanny valley: that place between the common and uncommon, where things strike me as both interesting as strange.