Back in 1970, a Japanese engineering professor called Masahiro Mori wrote an intriguing paper suggesting that a person’s response to a robot would shift from affinity to revulsion the more lifelike it became. He called this phenomenon the “uncanny valley”.
Children may love toy robots, which are hard to confuse with a living creature. But we feel much more uneasy when we see physical robots — or nowadays digital avatars — that closely resemble humans and realise they are not human.
What happens, though, when our artificial creations become so convincing that they pass through the uncanny valley to the other side? For better or worse, we may soon find out, in the digital world at least.
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