I just checked out the short article ‘Is The “Uncanny Valley” Pseudoscience?’ at io9 and saw this chart for the first time:
The idea of the “uncanny valley” always sounded plausible to me, even though I don’t find robots and animations as creepy as some people apparently do, but now having seen the chart that defines it, I declare it nonsense. The next closest thing to healthy human after a humanoid robot should not be corpses and zombies! At least not if we’re evaluating people’s response to ever more humanoid robots.
Corpses and zombies should always fundamentally disturb us because the aversion to decomp is hard-wired into us. Or like, it should be.
I’m guessing that if people do experience discomfort when confronted by robots and androids falling in the higher range of that chart, it’s the same people that are freaked out by clowns.
I personally missed a lot of the popular culture when I was growing up, and so don’t particularly have anything against clowns or murderous robots. You make a sex bot that looks like Jude Law and falls anywhere on that graph between robot and person and I’ll buy it.
