Masahiro Mori’s graph of the Uncanny Valley
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"The abject is not an object facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an object, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to the ‘I.’" (Kristeva 1982)
The concept of the Uncanny Valley that was introduced by Masahiro Mori into the field of robotics in 1970 deals with just such a conundrum: How do we react when we encounter beings whose embodiment is very similar to that of our own – and yet they are possessed of a not-quite-thereness that in its most extreme states may raise an unsettling closeness to things such as corpses or zombies? Is this a state that is too close for comfort? And when we are confronted with it do not we feel a deep rooted abjection toward this ‘thing’ that may be perceived as “not an object facing me, which I name or imagine” (1982); in other words, not as an object that has a clearly marked ‘otherness’ to the extent where I can successfully externalize it.
Mori’s hypothesis is linked to Ernst Jentsch’s concept of ‘The Uncanny’; identified in his 1906 article, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’; which later also inspired Sigmund Freud to write his famed 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’; the latter being a discourse on the aesthetics evoked through such a state. Jentsch relays to us that a perception of the uncanny results from “an intellectual uncertainty,” relating it to occurrences such as those that would engender “doubts as to whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.” (Jentsch, 1906: 203 – 205)
Freud elaborates on the uncanny with the aid of a lexical survey that seeks out the etymological connections between the German words Unheimlich (Uncanny) and Heimlich (homely or secret). Through the double meaning of the latter word he demonstrates that the concepts might be far more closely connected to one another than would have been initially anticipated: “It may be true that the uncanny (unheimlich) is something which is secretly familiar (heimlich), which has undergone repression and then returned from it.” (Freud, 1919) Freud places the repressions in two areas of the subconscious: The part of our selves that underneath a thin veneer of enlightened civilization is still very closely bound to the primordial/atavistic and secondly in the part that is in the realm of infant sexuality. One of the most valuable observations that Freud makes on the subject however, is related not directly to the uncanny entity itself but to the context within which it is actually encountered. Thus he points out that entities that are not perceived as even remotely uncanny in fairy tales, acquire ominous significations when encountered in a setting of literary works that place their subject matter within realistic settings into which the same or very similar uncanny elements are inserted.
Mori’s findings established that as a robot becomes more human-like, 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 a strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and the motion of the robot continue to become even less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.
Thus, the curve of Mori’s famous graph of the Uncanny Valley does not follow a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is the formation of a smooth peak as the resemblance of the robotic agent moves increasingly towards humanness; however this peak is immediately followed by a deep chasm that plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where the resemblance to humanness is complete. Mori called this area of repulsion aroused by a robot situated between the ‘barely-human’ and the ‘fully human’ the ‘Uncanny Valley,’ representing the dip in the graph at which the observer sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to be eerie or disquieting. The preceding peak, however, is where the perception is of an entity, human enough to arouse some level of empathy, while yet remaining clearly non-human enough to avoid a sense of confusion and wrongness.
