Why Your Next Lover, Therapist, and Friend Could Be a Robot

Advanced AI’s that humans can form a strong emotional bond with are a staple of science fiction. But could people one day actually form relationships with robots powered by AI?

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Androids are constantly improving but…well, let’s face it—they’re still pretty bad. There’s just something about them that still isn’t right and that could keep people from forming connections with them.

They often fall into what’s been dubbed the uncanny valley, an idea introduced in the 1970s by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. He noticed how people seemed repulsed by things that were very close to human, but not quite there.

Because of the informal nature of the concept’s creation, it’s existence is actually a topic of debate among psychologists, with some proposing that there’s no well-defined valley per se, just an uncanny phenomenon that different people may feel to different degrees. Some people may not experience that uncanny sensation at all.

So since the uncanny valley isn’t a hard-and fast rule, it’s not an impassable obstacle when it comes to forming relationships with androids. Really people can form relationships with anything—
humans are emotional creatures and we have a tendency to anthropomorphize even inanimate objects all the time.

#AI #artificialintelligence #robots #uncannyvalley #seeker

Read More:

What Is the Uncanny Valley?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-is-the-uncanny-valley
"To better illustrate how the uncanny valley works, here are some examples of the phenomenon. Prepare to be freaked out."

How Autodesk’s assistant Ava attempts to avoid uncanny valley
https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/18/how-autodesks-assistant-ava-attempts-to-avoid-uncanny-valley/
"The Ava avatar was made by Soul Machines, a New Zealand company that believes in making digital people and raising them like a child."

The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori
https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/MoriTheUncannyValley1970.pdf
"More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people's reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person's response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance."
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