From the Vault: Into the Uncanny Valley

The far side of the uncanny valley rises steeply, assaulting our psyche as our artificial human likenesses creep ever closer toward perfection. But what happens when we actually emerge on the other side? What happens to human society when video footage is no longer the gold standard? Robert and Joe investigate. (Originally published April 4, 2017)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it is
time to enter the vault. Because it is Saturday, time
to go into the archives for an old episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This time we wanted to
revisit our original exploration of the Uncanny Valley. This was
a two part episode U Part one was originally published

(00:26):
April four. I think back on this episode a good bid. Actually,
I guess I encounter a lot of strange almost their
simulations of the human likeness. Yeah, yeah, this one, this
one is one that that I think back to a
lot as well, just because, yeah, you're always encountering some
imperfect digital recreations of a human likeness, and then we

(00:49):
have to sort out how we feel about it, but
also how we've perhaps been conditioned to feel about it
just by knowing about, uh, the idea of the Uncanny Valley.
So yeah, this is gonna first of two episodes of
this episode is Into the Uncanny Valley, originally published April four,
and then in the subsequent episode, we're going to go

(01:09):
Beyond the Uncanny Valley. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Mind from how stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I want to take

(01:30):
you back to a conversation we had. I think it
was last December. It was right after I went to
see the new, the most recent Star Wars movie, Rogue one.
Oh yes, uh, And I am on the cusp, the
very cusp of seeing it myself and waiting for it
to become rent rental options. So oh it's not yet.
Still got still a week or two out. So has

(01:50):
everything been spoiled for you so far? No? People have
been a little um cooler on this one. Um. I
think some things are probably spoiled for me, but not
like that last one where every just really felt the
need to, you know, just lay it all out on
social media. Let me let me spoil one thing for
you here and they go to space and there's a
war there. Yeah, stars among the stars. But there is

(02:12):
one thing in the movie. Okay, so mild spoiler for
Rogue one coming out. It's something that probably everybody already knows.
It's also not really about the content of the movie,
but just about which characters you see. But if you
are ready, are you ready for the mild spoiler? Okay,
we get to see if you remember back to the
original Star Wars. Back go back to the seventies. Peter
Cushing as Grand mof Tarkin, the guy who was in

(02:34):
fact Darth Vader's boss on the Star Him. Yeah, he's
enough of this, Vada release him. And we love Peter
Cushing because he was in all these old monster movies.
He goes back to the Hammer movies. He was. He
was Dr Frankenstein, like the villainous Dr Frankenstein of the
Hammer films. And he I think was the hero of
the version of the Mummy that has Christopher Lee as

(02:56):
as the Mummy. Uh, the one. I've got the poster
for it in the House six up. It's the Belgian posters,
so it's La Malediction de Feron. But yeah, so Peter
Cushing was the original Grand mof Tarkan, this bad Empire
guy who was Darth Vader's boss. And the thing they
do in the New Rogue One is they bring him back.

(03:17):
He's dead, he has passed away. This movie takes place
a little bit before the original Star Wars is supposed
to have taken place. But they bring this character back
and they have an actor stand in as him, but
it's not just a recast role. They try to make
it look as if this is Peter Cushing standing here
delivering the lines with c g I. And this is

(03:38):
an odd choice because all right, so you're gonna have
Darth Vader in there, that's easy to do. Darth Vader
is a dude in a suit, voiced by James Earl Jones.
James Earl Jones is still alive, so you can check
that one off the list. But Grandma Tarkin, like you said, uh,
the actor is dead. So it seems to me like
the first easiest thing to do is just don't have
those scenes. If you know it's going to be ablematic,

(04:00):
don't even mess with it. Or um, just use an
actual living actor such as Wayne Pigram who played him
in Revenge of the Sith. Or go with Ben Cross,
who's another actor that I've seen over the years brought
up as potential Tarkan casting, or head go with Ralph Finds, Like,
clearly you have the money to throw down the well
of expensive c g I equipment, Just go ahead and

(04:22):
hire Ralph Finds. I know he's pricey, but he's great
and it's consummate evil Brett. Yeah, he even kind of
looks like a younger Peter Cushing. He's got that same
kind of angular face, like the thin long face with
the jaw and the scowl. It's all there. And it's
not like fans of various franchise are not clearly cool
with recasting. It's not like we're gonna be thrown into,

(04:44):
you know, a traumatic spin, because you can look to
a Game of Thrones, James Bond, Twilight, Harry Potter, etcetera,
like we we get it. We can roll with a recast. Now.
I want to go into completely different directions thinking about
this c g I grandmof Tarken. One is that I
didn't like it in the movie. Okay, I saw it

(05:05):
and I was just like, I don't want this. It
pulled me out of the movie. It made me stop
being in the story and just thinking about how did
they do that? I don't On one hand, it looked
great like when you see the movie, I think he
will kind of have to agree. It's unless I'm missing something.
It's the best c g I simulation of a real

(05:26):
person that I've ever seen. Like it looks amazing, but
it still looks not quite good enough that I can
just accept it and go with it. I kept continually thinking, like,
what am I looking at? It's almost really him, but
it's not quite really him, and it made me feel icky.
So in this it made you to send into what

(05:48):
we've come to know as a as a as a
species as the Uncanny Valley. Right, So today is going
to be the first of two episodes we want to
do about the Uncanny Valley, and this first one we
wanted to descend into the Uncanny Valley, but not us
talk about it in terms of the standard pop culture phenomenon,
because this is one of those side tech concepts that
is totally filtered down into the mainstream. Everybody talks about

(06:09):
the Uncanny Valley. It's a totally normal, ground level pop
culture phenomenon now, especially with as much bad C. G
I as we encounter in the movies. But there it's
also a scientific field of study. It's something that people
are looking into with empirical research to try to figure
out does it really exist, If it does really exist,
what causes it, what can be done about it. So

(06:30):
we want to look at it from both of these
angles today, Right, so we should probably roll through some
just fun examples of this. We're gonna try and not
to go too long on this. If we do, we'll
cut it and save it for trailer talk. Either way,
we'll probably do a Facebook live trailer talk on an
upcoming Friday about some of these movies. Okay, so I
want to go back to a much earlier experience for me, Robert,

(06:52):
did you see The Mummy Returns in two thousand one?
Remember this one? I don't think I saw The Mummy Returns.
I saw the Money and I remember digging it at
the time, but not not the old hammer one or
the universal one. You know, the Yeah, the the re
the reboot of the Money. Is his name, Brendan Fraser. Yeah,
and what Arnold Vosslo? Yeah he was he. I I

(07:13):
enjoyed him as they kind of brought in some of
these aspects of the tragic Mummy figure, which I liked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
But in two thousand one we got the Scorpion King.
This is a character that appears in the Mummy Returns
and he's pretty much if you want to picture it
if you haven't seen the movie, actually you should look
up video of this. We're gonna tell you to go
look up images and video quite a few times in
these episodes because some visual aids will help. But if

(07:35):
you want to picture it, picture the concept of a centaur,
except replace the horse parts with scorpion parts and some
other random arthropod bits, and the man part on top
is Dwayne the Rock Johnson, except it's not Dwayne the
Rock Johnson. There's a there's a bit of a problem
with the rocks. So the corpion Scorpion, the Scorpion King,

(07:56):
scuttles into action in the film, and you can tell
immediately something is wrong because it's not just the rock.
It's this c g I upper body designed to look
like the rock. It's supposed to be him, but it
doesn't look right. It looks like somebody took the rock,
skinned him, and then took the skin suit and then

(08:17):
boiled it and then maybe ironed it and rubbed it
down with wax, and then stretched it over somebody else,
like a bald Crispin Glover wearing a waxed up the
rock suit. And and that would be fine if that's
what they were going for, But I guess the disconnect
here is that clearly they wanted this to be like
the Rock as a scorpion center and not this um

(08:41):
creepy in human above the nation that you've described, right,
And it's sort of I guess works because it's okay
if he's creepy, because he's a monster. But he was
creepy in a way that he clearly wasn't supposed to be.
It wasn't just that, oh he's a monster. He looks weird.
Something looked wrong with him. And this was at a
time when computer generated animations were hot, right two thousand one.
They seem to be getting better all the time, and

(09:03):
yet they were terrible producing these characters that were not
only not convincingly human, they were literally physically unpleasant to
look at. They were repulsive. Yeah, it was a period
when everyone was just foolishly optimistic about what we could
achieve with c g I, and you know, into in
in a sense, maybe that hasn't gone away. We're still
very the Rogue one example, Like, clearly everyone was very

(09:26):
optimistic about how great this looked, and even though to
your point, it does look great, but within the context
of the film, something doesn't quite work. Yeah, I would say,
now for some people we can get into this more.
I think, especially in the next episode when we then
the next one, we want to try to go beyond
the valley, the Uncanny Valley. But I will say at

(09:47):
this point, for some people, Tarkan was not over the
line or under the line. I don't know where you
put the line. But for for some people it worked,
and I do think that's an interesting thing to acknowledge
that while for me I I experience this, uh, not
to the same extent as the Scorpion King, but a
kind of Scorpion King revulsion, not everybody did. Now, one

(10:07):
thing about Tarkan is that the Tarkan c Jack character
is correct me if I'm wrong, because I have not
seen it myself yet. But he is interacting with human
actors in this in his scenes, Yeah, I think, so okay,
or at least he's in a film with other human actors,
even if he's not sharing the exact same scene with them.
So you might think, well, if you just had a

(10:28):
movie just full of brilliant looking Tarkins, maybe it would
be okay. And maybe it would But some of the
classic examples of Uncanny Valley happened to be films that
are filled with nothing but c g I characters. Yeah,
how about one from the same year as The mom
of Your Turns two thousand one, if you go back
to Oh yes, Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, I remember

(10:51):
kind of liking it. I do too. It was a
film that I think I kind of half watched, half
worked on, like some just college course workers something. It
was just on in the background and and maybe that
was the right level of immersion in it. But I
remember digging it. But at the same time, there are
a lot of dead puppet eyes in this movie. Oh yeah,
and it's so I saw it at the time. I

(11:12):
remember having mixed feelings about the animation, like in some senses,
I remember thinking, Wow, that looks so cool. That again
may have been a product of its time. We can
talk about that more, how our expectations changes things go on.
But also I don't know. There were multiple things wrong
with that movie, one of which being that the last
line of spoken dialogue in the movie, as a friend

(11:34):
of mine pointed out at the time, was oh it's warm.
Well I can I don't remember the line, so I
can't speak to it how well it landed, But I
can see that being a problem. Role credits Now. Another
big one, this came out just three years later, is
of course, The Polar Express. Now, when people talk about

(11:54):
the Uncanny Valley these days, i'd say this is a
top three mentioned. Yeah, this is one of the defining
nightmare of our time now based on a wonderful children's
book about the magic of Christmas time. Yeah, the book
is wonderful, but it's certainly one of these examples. If
you take a very brief children's book and you try
and adapt it into a feature length motion picture, that's
very difficult to do. In fact, I'm really grasping for

(12:17):
an example where anybody actually pulled it off. Like, the
best adaptations of children's books that come to mind are
all very short, very short films. Generally, I'm thinking of
Dr Seus's adaptations from the seventies and eighties, not The
Polar Express, which is just an exercise in psychic trauma

(12:37):
brought on by just seemingly intentionally weaponized Uncanny Valley. Um,
you know, the soulless puppet people. I've never seen this movie,
but I looked up clips to see what people were
talking about, and oh man, they they are not kidding it.
I don't know how children made it through this movie.
It has these it has these creepy elves, It's got

(12:59):
a creepy Tom Hanks as a train conductor. Nothing seems right,
Everything seems like it's just about to everybody's about to
start melting and screaming. Yeah. I think this is one
where it was a poor idea in my opinion, and
uh in the technology was not there to to rescue
the idea. Now the next one we're going to discuss though.

(13:20):
I think it was a great idea on paper, but
it just didn't work out on the screen. And that's
of course. Two thousand seven's Bayowolf. Now as this Robert
Zemeckis who did this, Yeah, Robert Zemeckis helmed it. And
then the writing it was Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery.
So some you know, some some some big names just
attached and to the the ideas behind this. Uh this movie,

(13:43):
and of course based on the story of Grindel and Beowulf,
which is a classic you would think, you know, hard
to miss action narrative. I think The Bao Wolf could
make a really great movie if somebody did it right. Yeah,
I think so too. I have yet to see that movie.
But but but certainly has all the potential in the world.

(14:03):
And they had a pretty cool vocal cast as well,
I think, and Angelina Jolie is in it as the
monster's mother. They have ray Winstone as Bowel. Yeah, he
does the voice of of Beowulf, and uh and who
was it that plays the monster? We were just Crispin
Now I've seen it all back home. Not one of
my favorite monster depictions of Grenville, by the way, but

(14:25):
he's a monster. We can get past that. But everybody
else in the film really has the uncanny valleys that
going on to to a high degree. I think I
read a quote somewhere where film critic was talking about
how the monsters in the movie were only slightly less
frightening than the humans. Yeah, yeah, the humans. It just
it just didn't land. Now at this point you're probably thinking, well,

(14:47):
how about video games, because they're certainly when you're thinking
about computer animated human beings interacting with each other, staring
right into the camera, you think of video games. Yeah,
and and I think, you know, here's here's the thing here.
I have to say that I haven't noticed it as
often these days. I think a lot of game animators
have found ways to get around the Uncanny Valley. I

(15:10):
don't want to get to ahead of our flow here,
but I think one thing that I've noticed they sometimes
do is that they don't actually go for photo realism,
and they go for a kind of more real than
real combination of like a comic book style type character illustration,
and then these other realistic aspects that when you when

(15:30):
you look at a video game character, you would never
mistake it for a photograph of a person, even even
one that's got really good graphics. But much like the
way dialogue is written in films, you know, you don't
want to make dialogue sound like real people talk, because
that would be horrible to listen to, but you do
want to make it sound quote realistic. You don't want

(15:52):
to make your characters look too realistic in animation, but
you do want to make them look quote realistic. In
other words, they feel real. Yeah, this reminds me of
a game franchise that I haven't I don't think I've
ever played more than a demo of this, but the
Gears of War series. So all the people in this
kind of look like like, if you're gonna be critical
of it, you might say, well, everyone looks kind of

(16:12):
like they're weird guerilla people. Like. It was a like
we're in an alternate world where unrealistically huge upper bodies. Yeah,
is if evolution took a slightly different turn into an
intelligent primates. Uh. And yet they look real. They don't
look like they don't get an uncanny effect rolling off them,
Like you know, you look at them, you can see pores,
you can see hair follicills. They look real, but they

(16:36):
are but they are certainly not going for authentic human
being there all right, Now, I want to put out
one more example here before we move on, and it's
a rare example of uncanny valley avoidance, a very specific
type of uncanny valley avoidance, and that is from a
fantastic stop motion short that was produced by the National

(16:58):
Film Board of Canada. And you can find the online
if you just do us a search for it. It's
Madam Tutley Putly and it's a wonderful little little film,
very very French feel to it. Characters on a train, weirds,
frightening things occurring. Uh, definitely check it out. But the
trick to it there, these are stop motion animated characters

(17:18):
and their eyes just feel so alive. They stare right
into you, and you don't you don't question for a
second that these are that these are people. And the
trick that they employed is that they used real human eyes,
not in a you know, depraved, evil puppet master kind
of a way, either. They videotaped the eyes of human
actors and then blended the footage with that of the puppets.

(17:40):
That sounds like an incredible gambit, because that sounds like
that could have produced some of the worst Uncanny Valley
feelings ever if it went wrong. Yeah, and and I
don't know, there may be some people who watch this
short and and have the opposite effect and think that
it's super creepy. I found it to be like this,
this interesting example of circumventing the Uncanny Alley. But I'll

(18:00):
leave it for you guys to decide. I'll include a
link to this one as well as some of the
other sources we're talking about on the landing page for
this episode. It's stuff to blow your mind dot com.
All right, well, we are going to take a quick
break and when we come back, we will get into
the origin of the scientific idea of the Uncanny Valley
and its history. And research. All right, we're back. So

(18:23):
the uncanny Valley. Where does this even come from? Right?
So we've already been talking about it because most people
have heard of this, they're somewhat familiar with it. I
was talking to Rachel about it though. She was saying,
you know, at least to her, it had this connotation
of just generally synthetically generated images being creepy in one
way or another. So maybe we should get into the

(18:45):
specifics of the origin of the idea. So let's go
back to the year nineteen seventy. Everything's great, Wait is it?
I don't know, but but everybody, everybody's looking forward to
the future in terms of creating humanoid robots. What are
we going to be able to do well? The Japanese
roboticist massa Hiro Mori of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

(19:08):
He wrote a paper that was published in this Japanese
journal Energy that coined the term uncanny Valley to describe
a problem that he was predicting with increasingly humanoid robots.
And this was based on just some observations he'd had
of of different events. So you might say incidents in
the progress of designing humanoid robots such as consumer electronics

(19:32):
shows in Japan and stuff like that. So what he
predicted was that as you had a humanoid robot, robot
that looks like a human and it's likeness to a
human increased, our attitude toward them would improve. Our affinity
would go up as they became more human, until they
reached a certain tipping point of similarity to humans, where

(19:55):
suddenly our affinity, our friendly attitude, almost immediately shifts and
plunges down into strong revulsion. Being human is likable, being
sort of human is likable, but being almost human is
horrible and repulsive. And then of course at the final end,
uh you you would have a real human. So you

(20:16):
can think of the uncanny valley as a phase in
a graph, an X Y graph, and along the horizontal
axis on the bottom, you've got the degree of similarity
to a human, and then on the vertical axis you've
got the degree of our affinity for the object. And
more hypothesized, this graph would have these two peaks. You'd
start with zero on both axes, because a thing that

(20:36):
has no human like traits basically gets no human affinity
response one way or another. And we just don't you know,
how much do you really like an industrial conveyor belt
that you're just sort of neutral on it. But as
you increase the humanity, you give a robot arms or
something that looks like a face, eyes, limbs, you climb

(20:57):
this gentle, gradual slope to the fur peak and affinity. Um,
you know, and he didn't name the peak, but I
think we should name the peak. I think this first
peak should be called something like the cuteness peak. That's
not exactly right because it's not exactly cuteness, but it's
recognizing something kind of human about what you're looking at. Yeah, Like,

(21:18):
I mean, we don't have to describe cute to everyone here,
but certainly this is hello kitty territory, this is the
this is the domain of large eye. It's vaguely infant
or kitten like creatures that would never be mistaken for
human or real, but they resonate with us for a
number of reasons. We could do a whole podcast. In fact,
we have an old podcast episode about the science of cute.

(21:39):
Why that connects with us? Yeah, so they would include
that would include all kinds of robots that are just
kind of have general, very basic faces that don't try
to have human skin or anything like that that just
might have like kind of a mouth and some cartoonish eyes. Yeah. Sure,
there you go. That the C three po boldly on

(22:00):
the cuteness peap. But at a certain point after this
first peak, this graph drops off steeply. So you keep
going along the x axis, but then the y axis
drops off, not just down to zero, but far below zero,
into the negative affinity range. And this part of the
graph is the uncanny valley. As the similarity to a

(22:20):
real human continues to increase near a dent. In other words,
as it becomes indistinguishable from a real human, our affinity
sharply shoots back up the second peak toward reality. So
I'd call this second peak the reality peak. It's when
you become, for all intents and purposes, a real human being. Yeah.

(22:40):
I would also say that if if robots were candy,
the bottom of the uncanny valley would be banana flavored
candy like that for me has always been a flavor
where it's like clearly like not only like runts that
have bananas, I think, so like like great candy, like
grape candy doesn't really taste like grapes, but it's if
it's enough from the Uncanny Valley of Candy the year

(23:02):
You're okay, whoa, You're right, banana candy actually does taste
like bananas in a way that makes it not really good. Yeah,
Like I've candy fans, I don't eat that much candy anymore.
So maybe the technology has advanced, but uh, my memory
of the banana candy is is that of an uncanny experience. Now,

(23:23):
one thing we should note is that so this original
paper was published in nineteen seventy twelve. English translation was
published in uh the I Triple A Robotics and Automation magazine.
And that's what I was using, is my reference, that
English translation from twelve. Uh. And so it has some
graphs here, It has Mori's original graphs or interpretations of them,

(23:44):
and we can get into a little more detail on
the nuances of Morey's theory. But one thing I did
read was that many years later somebody contacted more and
he and they were talking to him about this idea
he had of the uncanny valley, and they were like, well,
does does anything lie beyond the peak of reality? And
he said, hey, oh yeah, actually there is such a thing.

(24:05):
And he said, you know, beyond the real human, you'd
have sort of like artistic ideals. Oh wow, like the
realm of forms even right, Yeah, so well, I think
he used an example of like a statue of Buddha,
you know, a beautiful, perfect statue of Buddha. It's almost
like it we have greater affinity for it than we
have for a realistic human because we've been, well, to

(24:28):
a large point, we've been conditioned to rite. Yeah, that
that kind of gets into this, this idea of conditioned
familiarity that we not only have with religious icons, but
also with pop culture icons. So not only the Buddha,
but also Robbie the robot, or or even the Terminator
or well, yeah, that does make me think that in

(24:48):
some ways, if if aesthetic ideals and things that were
familiar with through our culture might be even beyond humans.
I mean, again, this is not like rigorous research, This
is just what more he says, he inks and predicts. Uh,
could could there be like a robot that we really
love that's actually better than a than a normal human? Well,
you know, there's a study that came out last year,

(25:10):
I believe from Penn State University that was kind of
interesting alone in these lines. So The researchers survey three
seven nine adults ages ages sixty to eighty six, and
they asked them for specific memories of robot films they'd
seen in their general attitudes towards robots and and the
you know the age here. As you might imagine, they're
really looking at at potential care robots, like the idea

(25:33):
of like, what kind of robots should help you use
the bathroom? Do you want something that looks like kind
of like a person, or do you want something that
looks like a forklift with a forklift mated with an
easy chair. But if you look at the ages used
here and twenty sixteen, when the studies took place, you
can say that these people grew up with science fiction.
Oh yeah, I mean they might not have personally consumed

(25:55):
a lot of it, but it's in the culture, right, Yeah.
They they definitely had access to it. And researchers found
that individuals who could recall more cinematic robot portrayals were
increasingly likely to hold positive attitudes towards robots in general.
So it didn't matter if they remembered murderous kill bots
or well meaning helper bots. Uh. They the mere memory
of multiple robotic portrayals correlated to pro robot vibes, so

(26:19):
the study findings. They also backed up the importance of
human looking human esque robots to invoke a sympathetic user response.
But the researchers stressed that robot designers might want to
incorporate robotic features that older adults will remember from their
cinematic past. So it's saying that, like, don't just try

(26:39):
to make it like a human. Try to make it
like the robots we have known and loved. Yeah, Like
make it fun. You know, if I'm if I need
a robot to help me go to the bathroom, make
it make make them the robots from Silent Running, you know,
Hulie Do and Louie, the little little guys. Then at
least I can engage my nostalgia a little bit totally.
So I want to look at a few more nuances.

(27:00):
Maury's original paper in nineteen seventy so one thing, I
do think it's very interesting and I want to come
back to as we explore this topic more. More hypothesizes
in the original paper that our perception of an uncanny
valley might depend on the context in which we're we're
viewing the being and the example he gives here is
he's talking about Buon Rocku puppets, and so he says, quote,

(27:22):
I don't think that on close inspection of bun Rocku
puppet appears similar to a human being. But when we
enjoy a puppet show in the theater, were seated at
a certain distance from the stage, the puppets absolute size
is ignored. Its total appearance, including hand and eye movements,
is close to that of a human being. So, given

(27:42):
our tendency as an audience to become absorbed in this
form of art, we might feel a high level of
affinity for the puppet. I think that's interesting. So it's
it's not just the object, but it's also the context
in which we experience the object. You might have very
different feelings about a and rocky puppet lying on the
floor versus one that you go to see in the

(28:06):
context of staging a play. Yeah. I think that the
puppet argument is something to keep in mind throughout considerations
the Uncanny Valley, because there are a lot of people
that there are a lot of people who have kind
of um an irrational version to puppets in general, and
certainly if you take just a still puppet and you
hold it up. There are various puppets that one might
find a little bit uncanny or creepy, etcetera. But in

(28:27):
the process of performing with a talented performer is going
to bring that to life. Like that's the art form.
And and there's so many different varieties of puppetry. Certainly
they're they're too broad. Categories are its situations where the
puppeteer is visible and puppet situations where puppeteers not. You know,
so you have your basic the muppet situation where you

(28:48):
don't see the puppeteers, but there are plenty of art
forms of puppetry performance styles in which the puppeteers very visible,
either completely or just their face. You see their eyes,
You see that there's a person involved here, and uh,
and there's not this this mystery or this sense of deception, right, yeah,
I think conceptual clues like that are very important. Also

(29:10):
is when you consider the the idea of going to
a puppet theater, it also includes a certain attitude charging
effect in the audience, Like an an audience member goes
to a puppet theater prepared to suspend their disbelief, like
you know what I mean, Like you put yourself in
an intentional state of open mindedness about what you're viewing,

(29:32):
and you give yourself an interpretive framework through which to Like,
if you were not prepared to watch a puppet theater
story and suddenly a puppet was just moving around, that
might be a lot creepier. Yeah, I agree. So part
of the Uncanny Valley effect is probably also in the
viewer themselves and in the so the context is not
just where you are, what's going on with what you're

(29:53):
looking at, but what you're expecting to see. Now, one
more thing that Morey points out is he thinks that
they're going to be very different rules governing the Uncanny
Valley for still objects versus moving objects. And essentially his
hypothesis is that movement is going to amplify both the
peaks and the valleys of the graph. So if you

(30:16):
imagine the graph we said earlier, gentle slope up to
first peak, you know, kind of cute whatever has some
human characteristics, then a dip down into too close to
human but not there, and then a final rise up
to actually human. He he would say, if it's moving,
the peaks are going to be higher and the valleys
are going to be lower. So a thing that is

(30:37):
moving gets greater affinity if it's good if it's at
one of these two peaks, but it's even more revolting
and unpleasant if it's at the valley. Uh So, this
this makes me think of Samara in The Ring, those
scenes where Samara is emerging from the TV or the well,
her movement is is jerky and and I understand that

(30:57):
they created that effect by having the actor or actress
walk backwards and then reversing the footage. So you have this,
you have this this movement that is, you know, natural,
but being reversed it it feels very unnatural and it's
hard to really pinpoint what's not working for you about it. Right.
So More in the end concludes he gives this recommendation

(31:19):
based on his hypothesis. He says, don't go for realism, right,
It's gonna be so hard if you're designing a humanoid robot. Now,
a lot of what we're we're talking about in these
episodes is animation. He's talking primarily about humanoid robots. But
typically these uh two fields get somewhat conflated in discussion
of the Uncanny Valley because in both cases you're trying

(31:40):
to create something that looks pleasingly human. Um. He wrote,
it's gonna be so hard to get out of the
valley up the second peak, that that's the reality peak
is so steep. Instead, roboticists should not try, and instead
they should aim for the very tip of the first peak.
Stick on the cuteness peak, because we know we can
get there. Think think Wally or other cute humanoid robots.

(32:04):
The first peak is not really that hard to attain.
People respond well to it, So why do you need
to try to go past it? Um? You know. As
for animated humans, I think a good analogy might be
here's one Pixars The Incredibles versus Final Fantasy the Spirits,
within which we already mentioned. The former they don't look
like real humans at all, right, they're cute, cartoonish, non

(32:27):
realistic humans, but they're quite pleasant. The latter goes for
and fails at photo realism and creates these characters that
are stiff and unsettling. In other words, he says, don't
try to climb out of the valley, just don't go
into the valley to begin with. Yeah, this this really
brings to mind just the idea of like filmmakers and
creators standing on the edge of this physical valley and

(32:50):
there's a local guide. They're saying, don't do it. Don't
do it, the value will consume you. And they're like, no,
you're Lucasfilm. We can do it. Yeah, we got all
this high text gear. There's no way that anything's going
to take us down there. And then they go down
there and it's just Jurassic Park or Congo with they
just get torn apart. You know, I do. I do
think the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park come out of the

(33:12):
uncanny valley for dinosaurs. They do. Yeah, And that introduces
an interesting wrinkle in that, like Maury is talking about
human wide qualities, it would probably be a related but
different thing to just say animal reality versus specifically human reality. Yeah,
because I mean when for non human creatures, certainly we've

(33:34):
been able to nail that. For ages, to stop motion creatures, often,
even if their movements are kind of herky jerky, they
feel great. Um that heard of stop motion robots in
older films, so that I've never had a problem buying
into them. And yeah, you're look into the eye of
the track or the t rex or the velociraptor and
you never doubt for a second. Yeah. But so one

(33:56):
thing I think we should point out is that as
prescient as Mori was of what would become this widely
recognized pop culture phenomenon his paper, it's not it's not
research really, it's just sort of observation and interesting speculation.
So what we should shift now to do, I think,
is talk about whether there's really any evidence that the

(34:17):
Uncanny Valley Number one exists at all? Is it really
a thing? Number two? Is it a is it a
unified phenomenon, or is it there there's some separate things
getting pulled into the net together here. And then finally
maybe we should look at if it's real, what causes it?
Why do human brains tend to react this way? So

(34:37):
maybe we should take a quick break, and then when
we come back we will get into more recent research. Thank. Okay,
so there's there's really no denying that there is some
kind of creepy humanoid synthetic figure effect. Right. We we've
all seen these c g I movies. We've all seen
these creepy robots and had that feeling don't like it.

(35:02):
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the uncanny Valley, as
described by more or as popularly conceived in culture, is
in fact a correct description of what's happening there. Right,
just because it it feels truthy, just because it lines
up with to a certain degree with how we feel
about the world, doesn't mean that it is. You know

(35:24):
that it is an actual effect that's taking place, and
or that it's even a fixed effect, et cetera. There
are a lot of factors to contemplate here, Like for
my own part, I've always found it interesting and I
definitely think there's something to it. However, you line it
up with similar cases in life, such as say, individuals

(35:45):
that you may encounter who have some degree of facial disfigurement,
and it might be extremely mild, it might be it
might be nothing more than a uh, and then you
know a lazy eye, or or you know some sort
of cleft lip or cleft palate scenario, or it just
might be like their faces maybe not all that symmetrical, right,

(36:05):
and you know nobody whose face is perfectly symmetrical. But
with all of these individuals, you interact with them, you
get to know them maybe, and whatever kind of like
initial um reaction is present, be it just kind of
a huh or that goes away, and you can unless
you're a total jerk, Unless you're a total jerk, or

(36:28):
you're gonna be able to relate to that person. You're
gonna be able to communicate with that person, and you're
not going to be thrown for a curve every time
they make eye contact with you. Yeah, I would agree
with that. So there is certainly, like in Maury's original formulation,
he he would, I think, put different kinds of um
physical abnormality somewhere on the ascending slope, on the on

(36:50):
the on the uncanny valley slope. So you have a normal,
healthy human up at the peak, I guess somewhere below
the artistic ideal of the great Buddhist statue or something.
But you'd have normal, healthy human. Then somewhere below them
would be people who have who look like there is
something wrong with them in terms of having uh, you know,
perfect health and symmetricality. I mean, certainly because just an

(37:12):
ill person. You encounter someone who is clearly a little
bit sick or a little bit hungover or whatever you
can tell, and it causes a light to go off
in your head. Yeah. Uh, And and yet we can
quite easily adapt to people like, you know, you see
somebody like that, it is you just know it is
not proper to react to somebody with revulsion. Oh yeah,

(37:34):
like right now in Atlanta as we're recording, this pollen
is everywhere. So there are several people in my life.
I'm not really affected by the pollen so much, but
it totally debilitates some of my coworkers, some of my
friends and red face puffy eyes. Yeah, and and sometimes
they're like walked out on allergy medication to boot and

(37:54):
you just get you just you know, you accept it.
You realize, oh, well, you know, my my friend here
is going to be kind of a pollen zombie for
a couple of weeks. But that doesn't mean we can't
hang out. It doesn't mean we can't work on this
or that. Yeah, so definitely, The Uncanny Valley has plenty
of critics, and plenty I think a very fair criticisms

(38:15):
leveled at it. I just want to go back to
one popular article. I came across a two thousand ten
article in Popular Mechanics by Eric Softge where he sort
of points out that at the time people were as
I think they are still now treating the Uncanny Valley
as a proven fact, but in fact, at the time,
he says, you know, there's really almost no convincing evidence

(38:37):
that such a thing even exists, and he speaks to
an expert named Carl McDorman, director of the Android Science
Center at Indiana University, and McDorman, who has conducted research
on the valley, offered his opinion in the article, saying, quote,
it turns out that there may be more than one
Uncanny Valley. It's not the overall degree of human likeness

(38:58):
that makes a robot or animated care acter uncanny. It's
more a matter of mismatch. If you have an extremely
realistic skin texture but at the same time cartoonish eyes
or realistic eyes and an unrealistic skin texture, that's very uncanny,
uh and the art. So that's an idea about the
perceptual mismatch that I do want to revisit later in

(39:19):
this episode. But the article also speaks to a guy
named David Hanson who's a roboticist who specifically specializes in
creating very realistic humanoid robots. I think he did that
that Einstein head thing. Oh yeah, nothing. So Hansen claims
that even if people find overly realistic robots creepy at first,
they get used to them within minutes. This is sort

(39:41):
of what you were just talking about. I think, you know,
you become acclimated even to something that you might uh,
at some kind of base level, have a negative reaction to. Yeah,
I keep thinking of having an isolation in this because
it's the game I'm currently playing, and uh and I
feel like that the c G characters are are a
pretty well done in there. I haven't felt that the

(40:02):
tinge of of Uncanny Valley washing over me. Some of
the voice actings a little weak. But but but speaking
of the voice, like the the the androids you encounter
though with the sex and uh androids that key. Yeah,
and when I first on Canny Valley, well, yeah, but
when I first encountered them, yeah, they had the uncanny

(40:22):
intentionally kind of creepy appearance and the very creepy robot voice.
But yet when they were not actively attacking me, I
kind of was. I was kind of cool with it.
It wasn't until he started becoming violent that that that
the mere sound of their voice or the appearance of
one uh down there, you know, in the distance down
the Hallway would would cause my nerves to react. I mean,

(40:43):
those things are funny, they're uh, they're a good part
of that game. But anyway, So in this UH article,
the author also cites some other unnamed robots roboticists, as
well as his own experience when he's talking about meeting
robots that he had previously seen on video, and one
thing he says is, you know, an Uncanny Valley effect

(41:05):
that was present when I saw a video of this
robot went away when I saw it in person. I
don't know if that's generally true of people. He claims
it's true. But even if this is truly the case
for robots, I'm not sure how it would apply to animations.
Probably wouldn't apply to animations. Um, But I think that
there are some good threads to start tugging at here,

(41:26):
because it's probably the case that there are more dimensions
to the Uncanny Valley than more he imagined in nineteen seventy,
meaning more than just that X axis of um closeness
to realistic human appearance versus distance from realistic human appearance. Yeah,
I mean, just what makes a person human, what makes
a lightness human? There's arguably a whole chorus of things

(41:49):
going on there. Yeah, so it would make sense that
that that chorus would play into the Uncanny Valley. Yeah.
So I do think that there are multiple other dimensions
to be explored, But I also don't think that means
we can conclude that there's nothing to the Uncanny Valley.
And in the past decade there's actually been an explosion
of research on the Uncanny Valley. So I think we
should look at a few interesting studies on the effect.

(42:11):
All right, Well, first one here that I came across
was a two thousand nine Princeton University study and they
looked into the effects of uncanny value of the Uncanny
Valley on maccaque monkeys, so so non human subjects. Yeah,
because that that makes sense, right if Yeah, if you
want to see if this is an evolved response, let's

(42:31):
look beyond the complications of human intelligence and human culture
and looked something closely related to us. Is it biological
rather than say cultural? Right, And so they showed a
selection of the primates close to real quote unquote computer
visuals of macaques to see if they responded with coups
and lip smacking as they do with their fellow monkeys. Uh,

(42:53):
and these these close to real computer visuals were essentially
lawnmower man monkeys. If you see lawnmower man. They kind
of asking if I've seen lawnmower man, Robert, you know
I've seen lawnmower man. Yes, so yeah, I think lawn
more man. Uh, and you kind of have an idea
that that level of computer animation, and the monkeys did

(43:14):
not want any part of it. They averted their eyes,
they acted frightened when confronted with lawnmower man monkey. So
it's not much, I admit, but it's a little experimental
evidence for the argument that Uncanny Valley is an evolutionary response. Right,
So if you can observe it in monkeys, there's probably
some element of it that that is biological in the brain.

(43:36):
It's instinctual and and not just something we've all learned
to say about weirdly looking animated characters and robots. Yeah,
and that would be maybe a weak piece of evidence,
but still a piece of evidence you could put in
the column of saying there is something there. The valley
does to some extent exist. Right now, the next study
that I ran across this comes back this to one

(43:59):
of the graphics that you pulled out of the believe
the original h study correct, Yeah, yeah, the original Morey's
original graphs. So in this graph and we talked about
diving down into the valley and then steadily trying to
claw yourself out on the other side, very very steep ascent. Yeah,
so you hit bottom and that's where you have a zombie.
And as you begin to scale out of the uncanny valley,

(44:22):
he has um uh myo electric hand and prosthetic hand
down there. As you climb back up, eventually hitting ordinary
doll and puppets and ill person and maybe hitting healthy
person at the very top. Again. But it's interesting you
have prosthetic hand down there, because this next study looks
at prosthetic and robotic and human hands. Yeah, this is

(44:43):
in the original study. More He talks about the variable
creepiness of prosthetic hands. And I found I found this
interesting because I don't know about you, but but growing up,
I felt like crazy robot hands, especially we're everywhere like
every G. I. Joe show or he Man type franchise,
there's always somebody. It could be a villain, it could

(45:04):
be a hero. But there were crazy robot hands galore. Uh,
And I always found them cool, and I feel like
a lot of us probably even fetishized them to a
certain point, Like we we didn't understand what it would
necessarily be like to lose and lose a hand and
the shortfall and the ability of technology at the time
and even today to replace that missing limb, but we thought, well,

(45:27):
that looks cool. Superpowered robot hands signed me up. Right.
But back to the study two thousand thirteen University of
Manchester study, and they looked at prosthetic hands. UH. They
used of forty three right handed participants, thirty six female
and seven male, and they were all looking at photos,
and the photos were divided into three categories human hands,

(45:48):
robotic hands like no question about it, that's a robot
hand I'm looking at like straight up terminator exoskeleton or
or or even less human, and then prosthetic hands. The results,
I have to say, reading through some some of the
writing about this UH and the original press release, the
results were kind of confusing sounding. They the subjects here

(46:09):
preferred human hands and robot hands, but but rated and
certainly rated prosthetic hands is more uncanny, But prosthetics that
looked more human were less eerie. Okay, so, so something
that's clearly a robot that's not too creepy. Something's clearly
a human that's not too creepy. If something is a
robot trying to be human, that might be more creepy,

(46:31):
but as it gets better at being human, it's less creepy,
I think. So, I think that's my take. I mean,
it also makes me wonder if if the hand alone
is an is like a subset of the uncanny Valley,
because certainly if you're if you're just working with a
hand and trying to replicate the movements, the look, the
feel of a human limb for an observer, not we're

(46:53):
not going to even get into the the you know,
the problems of creating something that the user can experience
as a life like limb. But if you're just looking
at it, if you don't have to worry about its
eye contact, you don't have to worry about micro expressions. Uh,
it seems like it would be an easier peak to surmount. Yeah,
so that if that is in fact the correct interpretation,

(47:14):
that would seem to undercut the steepness in Maury's original
graph right on the on the final peak. Yeah, that's
I mean, that's what I'm wondering, because the hand had
taken in isolation, is if you thinking to be easier
to replicate? Yeah, uh and uncanny Valley. Let's face it,
when we talk about it, most of the time we're
talking about faces. Right now, Speaking of faces, there's another study. UM.

(47:41):
This is a two thousand and eleven University of California,
San Diego study. UM. This is published in the Social
Cognitive and Effective Neuroscience. And they did exactly what you'd
expect researchers to do when confronted with the Uncanny Valley.
Grab the f m r I and see what our
brains are doing when we're looking at all these images.
So all these fMRI I studies, all right, well, what

(48:02):
what did they find? All right, I'll roll through the
basics of the study here. So twenty subjects, not a
not a huge study here, aged twenty to thirty six.
And here were some of the caveats they had in
selecting these individuals. No experience working with robots, no time
spent in Japan, no friends or family from Japan because
they wanted to avoid uh, any you know, potential cultural

(48:25):
exposure that would have made them would make them more
accepting of androids. Okay, so the idea is that maybe
in Japan people just experience humanoid robots way too much. Already,
they're too they're acclimatized to them. Yeah, that that's the
the argument they made, and laying out the study, let's
let's not even go there, let's just deal with people
who have less exposure to robots. And they were shown

(48:48):
twelve videos of a humanoid robot named repley Q two.
Oh man, I'm looking it up right now. It's it's
it's rough. But well, they watch video twelve videos of
this robot doing there is things, and they were shown
videos of humans doing the same things. And in fact,
the robots movements and mannerisms were patterned directly after the humans.

(49:09):
So you had a you had a human version of
the actions, you had an android version of the actions, uh,
you know, a lifelike robot, and then you had a
a stripped down version of the androids. So basically the
android of all its skin ripped off, so it looks
more like a robot, clearly a robot, and it's doing
the same motions as well. So this broke it all

(49:29):
down to a human with biological appearance in movement, a
robot with mechanical appearance and mechanical motion, and a human
seeming agent with the exact same mechanical movements as the robot.
Then in came the f M R I scans. So
the main brain area of note here, the the area
that that that that lit up where we saw the

(49:51):
most activity, the parietal cortex on both sides of the brain,
specifically in the areas that connect the part of the
brain's visual cortex that process bodily movements with the section
of the motor cortex thought to contain mirror neurons. Okay,
so those would be like the empathy parts of the

(50:12):
brain where you know, we we see something going on
in some other creature like us, and we empathize with
it exactly. Yeah, So when viewing the human looking android,
the brain lit up at the recognition of a human form,
but registered essentially a computing error over the movement. Something
didn't match up. Uh so it's it's not. According to

(50:32):
this study, it would seem that it's not the biological
movement or the biological appearance, it's the congruents or lack
of congruents between the two. You look alive, but you're dead,
you look dead, but you move you or you speak
as if you're alive. Um. So, the researchers noted that
this is something that could be retuned through exposure, but

(50:52):
it could be at the heart of what's going on
with the Uncanny Valley. Interesting. Well, I think we should
look at one more study potentially providing recent support for
the existence of the Uncanny Valley, and then maybe after
that we should break and then come back next time
to get into the causes, what what would be causing
this effect and uh in the future. So I want

(51:13):
to look at a study that came out in two
sixteen in the journal Cognition by Mather and Ricling called
Navigating a Social World with Robot Partners. A Quantitative cartography
of the Uncanny Valley. Cute invocation of map making there
because it does kind of make sense. I like the
idea of mapping the valley because that indicates that it

(51:34):
may expand beyond just the one dimensional dip and is
in fact more of a topographical space, you know, like
we can extend into three dimensions. But anyway, so to
get into the study, the author's note that while the
Uncanny Valley has very strong intuitive support, people tend to
take it as fact. Experimental evidence for it has been
limited and inconsistent. As as we mentioned earlier, some studies

(51:58):
seem to find evidence for the valley. Others don't you know,
they say this, this isn't necessarily a thing. So there
are multiple experiments here. First, they did a thing that
I think was pretty smart. If they were trying to
chart a linear progression of the up and down peaks
and valleys, they tried to generate an objectively determined gradient

(52:19):
of more and less human looking robots. So what a
lot of these studies do is maybe along the macaques
study ideas, they show you a lawnmower man, they show
you a real person, they show you a robot, uh,
and they ask you to characterize you know, how do
you feel about these? What they did here is that
they gathered a very large sample or relatively large sample

(52:40):
of eight images quote from the wild, meaning from the internet.
So these wild type robots samples, and they had a
bunch of inclusion and exclusion criteria. I don't want to
get into all of them, but they tried to limit
it to where it would it would kind of throw
out all these variables. They could complicate things like they
tried to keep just certain types of pictures of faces

(53:02):
of real robots that are built and uh, and they
had some exclusion criteria like it couldn't be a well
known character, a famous person, um, it couldn't have objects
overlapping the face, It couldn't be a toy, it had
to be a real humanoid robot. And then they had
subjects rate these images on what they call the mechano

(53:22):
humanoid scale, basically to come up with an objectively derived
score for each image by using this this empirical research,
by going to a bunch of people and saying, hey,
how mechanical is this? How human is this? And then
after they had a rating for each of these eight images,
and Robert have included an image, uh, I think down

(53:43):
here to show you, like what all these robots where
you can kind of see. It starts with things that
look not human at all, just like a lump of
wires and junk, and then it proceeds up to something
that looks like a picture of a guy. Yes, yeah,
very much. So. You start off with very kind of
wally asque heads. When you move in through like like

(54:06):
skinless gremlins, and then through the sort of the the
expected hierarchy of humanoid robots. Okay, so they've got this thing,
and then they rate all these images and sort them
into an ascending scale of humanness. And then they took
ratings in multiple different ways of likability and trustworthiness. Now,

(54:26):
in likability, they claimed to find a robust uncanny valley effect,
where likability increased linearly with humanoid qualities up to a
certain point, and then it took a negative dip as
the humanoid qualities continued to increase past that point, and
then once again began to rise at the far end
of the scale. Now, one thing I want to say,

(54:47):
just looking at the results is it does not appear
that people were the most bothered by the things that
were the most human looking. Like given my understanding of
the uncanny valley, I would have expected the stuff at
the very top end the scale to be the most disturbing.
But they actually kind of liked the stuff at the
very top end of the scale. It was somewhere closer

(55:08):
to the upper half middle of the scale that they
really didn't like. Um, So, to whatever extent there is
a real uncanny valley, it might not lie so close
to the quote realism into the spectrum as we think.
They also performed some trust experiments by creating a scenario
where subjects would be asked to trust these robots to
invest money for them, and the results there were basically

(55:31):
they claimed that the trust uh experiments did show some
Uncanny Valley effects, but the results were a little more
complicated than on the straightforward superficial likability scale, the likability
really did look like Uncanny Valley was being displayed. They
also performed experiments with a more traditional quote controlled series

(55:51):
of composed face images, so it would just be a
series of basically the same face as a robot than
a little bit more human, little it more human, little
bit more human on this gradient of human nous. And
they generally claim to find that there was evidence for
the Uncanny Valley effect in both likability and trust with
both the wild caught robot image samples and with these

(56:15):
composed face images that they came up with, But as always,
more studies are needed. But that looks like there is
one study showing pretty solid evidence that there is something
like an Uncanny Valley effect. Yeah, and I like the
idea that that that that it's it's an uncanny valley.
But maybe it's just a more more nuanced from a

(56:36):
topographical standpoint. You know, they're they're more a little little
bumps and little valleys within the overall valley, little caves
you can crawl into and just yourself inside, and maybe
even caves that turn into tunnels that emerge on the
other side. Yeah, that that's an interesting thing. I mean,
like they point out that there's a lot of variability
in their data. Actually, like it wasn't um If you

(56:58):
look at their their plot chart of where all the
data points fall and then they plot a line going
through it, If you plot a line going through all
their data, it does show the uncanny valley effect. But
you know, there there are outliers all over the place,
like there is some there are some robots that are
just consistently more like more than the other ones. I

(57:19):
find it interestingly that the some of the higher rated ones,
or at least I think what number seventy nine in particular,
kind of looks like a generic human as opposed to say,
go down to seventy four that looks like a very
specific human, Like if I had to pick him or
pick the human he's patterned after assumingly out of a

(57:40):
police lineup. I feel like I'd be able to do it,
but also seventy four looks angry. I'm sorry, folks, you
can't see what we're talking about, but it's frowning at you,
kind of like should I kill all humans or just
shrug it off? And maybe two day's the day that
does introduce There are a lot of complicating factories here,
and the authors icknoled this, like these images don't all

(58:01):
have necessarily the same emotional affect, like some of them
seem happy, some seem unhappy. There's enough variability across the
board that you can think you're getting a reasonably decent
answer when you plot reactions across all samples. But yeah,
there's definitely a lot of different stuff going on here
in addition to just being more or less human. I

(58:24):
like how thirty four on our on our chart here
it seems to rely heavily on animated mustache and eyebrows.
Oh yeah, what is that? It looks like a It
looks like a very mustache. I can't add to what
you've just said. It's got a white mustache and brow
and beard, and it's saying, oh boy, it looks like
a lot of these incomplete puppets are stripped awaite puppets,

(58:46):
you see where they're like, all right, we got a
lot of work to do on this thing, but at
least we got the eyebrows and a mustache in place.
But see, I find that one very likable. It doesn't
look very human at all, but it's very I want
to play with it. Yeah, okay, Robert, Well, we've got
a bunch of more stuff to talk about, but think
we should call it there and come back and finish
our discussion of the Uncanny Valley next time. Yeah, we'll
get into we'll go be on the Uncanny Valley. Yeah,

(59:08):
so we'll we'll talk about what might cause the Uncanny
Valley effect to whatever extent it does exist, and we
can talk about you know, what happens when you ascend
that that far slow? All right? Well, hey, in the meantime,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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(59:29):
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