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Is the Uncanny Valley Real? · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: doing the robot, which means this is stuff you should know.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Robot stot. I knew i'd get a laughout. EA, sooner
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: or later? Did you do the robot? Can you do
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: the robot? I think I've seen you do pretty bad robot.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I don't know about pretty bad robot. I can do
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: a pretty great robot, that's what you've seen. I can't
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: do any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: and didn't really. If if you're claim to fame is
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: like a really great robot dance, I don't know, maybe
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: take up some other hobbies as well, kind of round
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: that out. You don't want them to be the only
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: thing you're good at, right, because if you list that
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: on the dating site, you might turn ladies off. Yeah,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: according to e Harmony, Yeah, that's foreshadowing. I love that one,
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: don't you. Yeah, that's some issues with that whole Oh yeah, yeah,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: we'll get to that. This is tad all right. Well,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: let's start the at the beginning. Almost the beginning. Chuck,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: let's go back to nineteen seventy, which was the beginning
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: of the greatest decade in the history of humanity. Yeah,
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: neither one of us were born yet I can finally
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: even say that I'm still not even born. It must
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: feel good. Yeah, okay, well, welcome to the club. I guess. Thanks.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: And in nineteen seventy, we're not just going just anywhere
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: at nights seven, We're going to Japan in nineteen seventy.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Japan was pretty cool in the seventies. Yeah, a lot
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: of bell bottoms, a lot of ninja running around. Still, um,
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: there were calculators being wheelded all over the place. Probably
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: it was a good time, good good time for Japan, right,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: and one of the one of the things that was
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: going on in nineteen seventy. I could not, for the
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: life of me find what issue of this journal it
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: came out in what month, But at some point in
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy there was an obscure journal, a Japanese academic
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: journal called Energy, and at some point during that year
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: it published a article by a Japanese roboticist, and his
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: name is Massa Hiro Mori. Thank you, I have a
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: lot of practice, and uh, Massa Hiro Omori uh published
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: this article and he named it Bukimi no Tani gen
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: show is actually the full name of the whole thing.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: And as we'll see, it's kind of difficult to translate
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: into English, right, and it took many, many years after
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: he wrote this article for it to be translated into
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: English for anybody even try to attempt it. So basically,
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Mori was this robotic cyst and he wrote this essay
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: and at the time he just put it out there
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: and went back to work, started teaching more and more roboticists.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: The whole new generation of roboticists learned under him and
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: his his work just kind of sat there. Um unobserved
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: that article, i should say, and then in two thousand
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: five a rough translation of it was leaked out wasn't
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: intended for publication, and the world entirely changed, right because
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Massa Hiro Morty had in his article put his finger
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: on something that no one had before in his capacities
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: a roboticist and a human and that was what we
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: call today the uncanny Valley. Yeah, so that's um the
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: idea that, uh, you're making a robot and we'll see
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: this apply some more than just robots. But in his case,
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: you're making a robot and you want to make it
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: look like a person um, which I guess not all roboticists,
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: some of them like the clunky jets and style robots
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: like Rosy. But I guess if you're Mori, you're you're
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: on the path to designing lifelike robots. And the closer
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: you get to that lifelike look, everything's going great. Everything's
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: going great, people are like, this is so cool, this
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: is so cool, and then all of a sudden, people
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: go oh like right as it approaches it's most or basically,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: when it reaches its most lifelike capacity, that this whoever's
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: making it can conjure people are repulsed by it. Yeah,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: which is something that most people who ever hear of
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley are like, yeah, you know, that's I've
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: noticed that. That's happened to me before too. But the
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: thing is, Chuck, it doesn't it doesn't actually make sense, right, Like,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: we know a robot is a robot. Yeah, so you know,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: maybe you could be afraid that it's gonna like pick
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: you up and break you in two or something like
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: a cartoon, but that's different than being creeped out by
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: like why would we be creeped out by a robot?
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: And this is what Morey put his finger on, was
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: there's something to this and it doesn't make sense, and
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: he he didn't. It wasn't even just um this article
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: that he wrote. He created a graph as well that's
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: become quite famous that um really kind of gets the
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: point across more than anything else. Yeah, And he wasn't
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: even the first person to to go over this and
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: to put a put some thought to it. Freud of course,
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: because he'd like to think about everything. He thought about
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: a little bit. And before Freud, there was a a
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Geman name anst yinched. Oh nice. I did not realize
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: that's how his last name should be pronounced. That's good stuff.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: I think I put a tea on the end, but
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: the teas in the middle, yinch. Yeah, I think that's right.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: I've been saying, Gentch. We don't. We'll have to look
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: that up. Then. I think you're no. I think of
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: the two of us, you're you got the German down. Uh.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: And he had a little term called um heimlich uh
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: that he called it so like you know, different languages
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: had different names for it. Um and you go back
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: in time, all the way back to like the seventeenth century,
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: and people were and I guess you know, robots didn't
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: look super lifelike back then, but whatever their version of
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: life like was. Uh. In the sixteen hundreds, people were like,
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: I don't like that. Why is it looking at me? Yeah,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: it's got a quill and it's writing things. But like
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: you said, Maury made this graph because he was a roboticist,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: and he thought, you know, let's look at this on
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: a plotted out so we can stare at it. And
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: on the X axis he had human likeness. Then on
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: the y axis he had affinity, like whether or not
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: you like the way this thing looks. And just as
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: we're talking about um, the graph went up and up
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: as uh, things got more lifelike and people like the
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: way look And then at a certain point there's that
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: valley there's a big dip. Uh. That really just kind
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: of says it all right, And again this all makes
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: sense intuitively, but as we'll see, that's it's been very
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: difficult to prove. And one of the reasons why it's
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: confounded research thus far is because we were not even
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: sure what more meant by some of the words he chose,
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: at least as far as translating them to English. Right.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Um For example, boukimi. Right, it was translated in two
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: thousand five as uncanny, but um again that that original
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: translation was not intended for publication, but it leaked out,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: and so Uncanny Valley became, you know, the the way
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: we all think of it here in the West. But
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: boukimi more closely resembles something like eerie. Like I've seen
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: it explain that, Um, a word like boukimi means more
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: than uncanny is just weird or remarkable or noteworthy. It's
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: not necessarily something that gives you the creeps. Boukimi is
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: something that that gives you the creeps, like Steve Bukimi's exactly. Um.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: So bukimi probably more should be should have been translated
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: the Eerie Valley. But by the time an actual official
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: translation that um Mori signed off on came out in
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, the cat was out of the bag.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: Everybody knew of it as the Uncanny Valley, and there's
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: no way anybody who's gonna come back and be like, no, no, no,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: everybody stop calling it that. It's now the Eerie Valley. Okay, right,
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: all right, And it may be one of those things
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: where we're so used to uncanny Valley now that it's
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: hard to imagine eerie Valley. But right, I think that
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: was the issue. Yeah, Like, nobody's gonna go along with that.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: So this graph, like I said, it starts off on
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: that left hand side, and this is where you have
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: things that are super robotic. Um like you know, a
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: packaging robot in a factory, um that you know, apparently
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: most people don't have funness for I do because I
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: love mechanical processes, um right, right, Okay, So there's there's
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: part of the problem. It's like that's not necessarily the
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: kind of feeling that massa Hiro Morty was talking about.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: He was like, yeah, yeah, you're interested in robotics and
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: robotic arms and the industrial processes, and you love watching
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: how it's made. Right. What he was talking about was
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: more like how it resembles a human and then how
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: it makes you feel in relation to its resemblance of
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: a human. Right. Well, in that case, it makes me
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: feel nothing because it doesn't look at all like a human. Right, Okay,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: So that would be at about the origin of the graph.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: It has no resemblance to a human really, and it's
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: not a listening any real affinity in you at all
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: as far as it looking like a human, right, but
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: lots of affinity as a thing that's just that's called props.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: So you go a little bit further on the graph
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: and then you have things like um little stuffed animals
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: and uh no. C three po is is a common
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: one that's mentioned because C three p O UM, you know,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: is built to look like a human. He does a
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: great robot. It talks like a human and acts like
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: a human. But when it comes to that face, and
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: as we'll see, the face is kind of the key
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: to all this um. For the most part, C three
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: po looks nothing like a human in the face. So
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: everything is still good and people love C three po. Right,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: So if you're looking at the graph, C three p
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: o is going up in human likeness because he kind
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: of you know, he's got some some commonality there, and
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: we're feeling affinity for him based on that human likeness.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: So it's he's going up. Okay, We're going everything's going
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: pretty well so far, right, Chuck, that's right, Okay, So
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: then we're gonna start hitting some areas where things start
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: looking a little more human, a lot more human, I
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: would say than c three p o, like say the
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: characters in mo Wanna or Frozen, uh picks our characters
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing where where they look like they're
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: supposed to be human, like they're based on human, but
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: they have very exaggerated features that you would never confuse
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: at first glance for an actual human. Right, So they
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: have like bi a guys, small noses, things that make
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: them cute, right, And so our affinity for them is
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: going up as the human likeness is going up. Again,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: things are going really well so far, that's right, because
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: in Mowanna and Frozen they look a little bit more
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: like people, and we like them a lot more for
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: that reason. And then, like you said earlier, out of nowhere,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: the whole thing, this line that's just been going up
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: very pleasantly, and a nice little slope just drops downward, right,
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: and it doesn't drop just downward, it goes actually below
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: the X axis into negative territory. And now this is
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley, that's right, And that's why it has
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: that name because it's a valley, right, And this is
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: where those things like really really life like androids live,
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: or um corpses live, or zombies live. Because Maury he
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: he had the idea that if something's moving, is even
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: creepier than something similar to it that's not moving. So
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: he actually created two lines on this graph, one for
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: things that are animate and one for things that are inanimate.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: So if you look at this uncanny valley on the
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: inanimate line, the non moving line, you've got corpses are
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: at the bottom of it. But if you look at
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: the animate line, it's even it dips even further below
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: than the inanimate line, and at the bottom of those
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: are zombies. So dead people up and moving around and
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: saying brains is as creepy as it gets as far
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: as this graph is concerned. Yeah, and he Maria wasn't
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: the only one that um earns yinch that we talked about.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: The German psychiatrists. Uh. He also talked about the fact
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: that if you are looking at something that should not
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: be moving and it moves. Um, I mean, I think
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: we can all agree that a baby doll that suddenly
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: turns its head and looks at you probably one of
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: the creepier things you can witness, right, you know, Yeah,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: it's about as creepy as it gets or um, have
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: you ever been to an open casket funeral? A few?
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: I'm not a fan at all. No, it is it
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: makes sense. You know, we've really kind of closed or
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: put a lot of space in between us and death,
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: way more than we used to have in like the
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: nineteenth century sit up with the dead. Sure, right, so
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: this seems to be like kind of a holdover from that.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: But if you've ever been to uh an open casket
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: funeral and have just stared at the corpse long enough,
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: like maybe it's arm or it's fingers or something, your
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: brain is so anticipating that they it's about to start
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: moving that sometimes you can creep yourself out and and
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: make yourself think you did actually see it move. You'll
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: also be asked to leave the funeral. Well you shouldn't
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: be like giving a commentary about this out loud, but
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: you can. You know, you can do it to pass
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: the time in the funeral if you're looking to to
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: kill some time. Uh So, here's the thing with all this, Um,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: we know this happens because everyone kind of has this feeling,
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: but no one and all this research has been done,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: and no one is exactly sure why this happens. So, uh,
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Maury's essay and especially once it was translated, Um, a
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: lot of research started happening in this area. And uh,
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: it's problematic though, because there are there are a few
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: different problems. One is, well, it's it's subjective. This dependent variable,
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: whether you have an affinity for something is very subjective,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: so it's hard to kind of nail that down scientifically, right,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: all right, So the number two is human likeness, right,
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: this is the independent variable. And if you have human likeness,
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: like what does that mean? Like what looks human? What
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: doesn't look human? But we haven't pinned that down. So like,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: if you can't pin the dependent variable down and the
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: independent variable down, it makes it really tough to study correct.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: And then there's a third one too. I love this one. Yeah.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: The third one is, uh, you know, the original hypothesis.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: It doesn't have a mathematical model that like really specifies
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: the shape of this curve, so it's still hypothetical, I guess, right,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Which means that so if you look at Mori's graph,
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: it was he just basically made a line, right, It
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: wasn't based on any studies he'd done. The whole thing
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: was really an essay more than anything else. UM. So,
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: researchers who are trying to seriously study the scientifically have
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: nothing that they're actually trying to place their findings against,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: which leads to uh put it puts them at risk
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: for what's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Greatest name fallacy
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: around and um it's it's based on the idea that
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: if you take a sharpshooter in Texas and have them
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: shoot at the side of a barn a bunch of times,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: some of them are inevitably going to hit the barn,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: and then the Texas sharpshooter walks up and then draws
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: the bull's eye around the bullets that he already sunk
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: into the side of the barn. That's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: It's ignoring data like the ones where he missed the
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: barn in favor of ones that fall into what you're
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: looking for, the bullet holes in the barn. You could
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: do the same thing with the um data that you
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: get from testing the Uncanny Valley if you have no
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: model to fit it into already. Yeah, I think they
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: would have done better if they would have just instead
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: of trying to prove something, uh, to maybe just research
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: and call it a thought experiment, you know, right, But
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: people are taking it seriously and we'll we'll talk about
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: some of this research right after this, chuck. Alright, So
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: we're back. And despite the fact that this is really
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: tough to study, it's not even established that it's a
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: real thing in everyone's mind. By the way, Um, there
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: there are people out there who are really studying the
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley and trying to pin it down. Yeah. One
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: of these people is at Dartmouth College psychologists. And I
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: didn't look up there mascot, the the the pub darts,
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: the fighting pub darts at Dartmouth College. We're gonna hear
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: from Dartmouth. But her name is Talia Wheatley. Um. And
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: she's done some research and has found that it's not
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: just like some uniquely Western thing or American thing. It's
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: kind of all over the world. She studied tribes and
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: Cambodia and they have the same sensitivities to these things
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: that look human but aren't human. Uh. And they've even
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: found that and I think it kind of all comes
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: down to the eyes. But they found just looking at
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: the eye can be enough. Yeah, Um, somebody can tell
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: whether it's a human or not just looking at a
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: picture of the eye, right. Yeah. And that's where I
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: think people lose credibility. And and we'll talk about movies
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: and sculpture and all that stuff, but they just never
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: get you can't get the eyes right, Like, you can't
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: put life in lifeless eyes? How are they try? Only
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: God can? Uh? And there was this other experiment where they, um,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: you know, like where you can morph a face, uh
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: digitally or whatever like that Michael Jackson Black or White video. Yeah.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: I think some people are creeped out by that even
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: but they would show this dull image and it would
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: morph into a human face. And basically they would have
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: people mark where they where they thought that it would
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: look more human than doll and it you know, it
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: landed about the mark as far as morphing into human,
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: which I mean you can't really apply that necessarily, but
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: just it's interesting. Offhand point is about where the Uncanny
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Valley happened in Maury's mind. Yeah, I would think it
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: would be higher than that, but um, yeah, it's still
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: super interesting. Um. And you were saying that the eyes,
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: and that's what you're betting on is that it's going
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: to turn out to be the eyes, right. So, trying
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: to investigate what constitutes human likeness, there's a researcher named
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Angela Tinwell, and she basically says, like, yes, it's all
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: about the upper facial features and that we we detect those,
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: we we read those, and so if there's any anything
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: that's even just slightly off in like you know, the eyes,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: or the brows or the wrinkles, that form um that
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: will lead to the uncanny valley that's the creeping part
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: or the smile too. She also says, well, yeah, and
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: all these things kind of come down to evolution, and
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: her point is like, you can't battle millions of years
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: of evolution that his honed are our dumb, little human
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: brain to detect something that's off about a face. Uh,
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: it's just too much to overcome. Basically, this other researcher
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: named Carl F. McDorman, who's from the University of Indiana,
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: who actually he's basically like dedicated his career to this. Now. Um,
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: he found that certain kinds of people if you do
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: like a personality inventory before testing for uncanny Valley sensitivity,
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: some types of people are predictably more sensitive to the
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley than others. Specifically, he found that very religious
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: people that makes total sense. Yeah, neurotic people, um, and uh,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: people with high sensitivity to animal reminders. It's basically anything
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: that reminds you that, hey, you're super civilized and you
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: drive a car and you know how to play poker. Um,
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: but you're still an animal, just as much as that
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: ape over there is an animal reminder. Um. People who
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: are sensitive to that kind of thing tend to go
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: off on the uncanny Valley as well. And then people
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: who are anxious are more likely to experience the uncanny
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Valley as far as McDorman is concerned. Yeah, that interesting
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: makes sense too, because they're probably just more prone to
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: be I don't know, just have a reaction to a
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: lot of things like this. Right. But but we should
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: say the science and all this, the fact that the
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: independent and the dependent variable are still not defined, the
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: science is this. This is like the scientific equivalent of
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: that backward over the head half court basketball shot. Yeah,
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: that's the level of science that these people are carrying
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: out at this point because they're they're a lot of
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: them sadly are conducting experiments based on something that again
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: doesn't have a set dependent or independent variable. So how
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: can you do that? As my question, Well, yeah, I
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: mean because in each experiment, they're going to be using
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: different uh stimuli, um, different faces, whether it's a doll
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: or a wax figure or a c g I character,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: And then they're gonna be doing different things and have
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: different expressions, and each person has their own subjective takes,
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: so it is very tough thing to kind of nail down. Yeah,
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: And I think some of them are actually trying to
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: form the basis of this field of study right now,
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: they're doing the groundwork. But I think some of them
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: also are like just chasing headlines, Like there's no better
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: way to get get into the media cycle with your
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: study than than releasing some five endings on the Uncanny
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: Valley people just love. Uh. One thing I thought was
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: interesting was, um, at Princeton they tried this with monkeys
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: and they found the same thing happened when they had
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: these realistic looking but fake monkey faces. The monkeys were
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: like it turned away. Um. It did make me think though,
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: like all the you've seen these situations where like an
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: orphaned animal has a a creepy puppet mother. Yeah, I
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: know exactly what you're talking about, and they seem to
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: like that. But however, and this is a bit of
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: a spoiler, but um, towards the end of this article,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: it points out that human babies don't have this reaction
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: at first either, and that it's kind of learned. So
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: maybe that explains it. Maybe with the animals, I know
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: you're talking about that that cage, Like, why are monkey mother?
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: It's super creepy? Is it? Black and white photo? Well, no,
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: I mean they do it. There's all kinds of animals. Well,
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: they'll they have like a fake tiger or a fake
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: duck or whatever, just so the animal will feed or
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: I mean it's usually an animal that that milks from
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: the mother, I guess. But um, it's a common thing
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: they do for orphaned milk feeding or breastfeed animals. And
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: they're always creepy. Huh. Well, I mean to us, but
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: to a dumb baby monkey, they're just like, sweet give
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: me the teat. There's a T shirt maybe even a
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: band name sweet give Me the Teat. Yeah, yeah, that
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: kind of falls into the long band named category. But
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: here's the thing is, not everyone agrees with this. The
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: whole thing like you said earlier, there's a man named
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: David Hanson and he's a roboticist as well, and plain
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: oh Texas, and uh. He did a very very basic study.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: It was a survey where they showed images of two
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: different robots that were animated to simulate human facial expressions
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: and basically just asked, Hey, what do you think of
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: this and said I like them? Yeah. Can you see
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: why people have trouble with this study? Though? Yeah, he
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: said not one person said they were disturbed. Okay, sounds
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: good for the most part, though, Studies into the uncanny
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: valley or like, now, we we're finding something here, although
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: we should be suspicious of ones that basically show the
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: uncanny valley that Moriy just graphed out of his like
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: with freehand, Like if you if you've come across the
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: study that shows that same thing, they're probably cherry picking data,
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: we got to say, out of his butt. Maybe there
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: was another study Edward Schneider at Suny Potsdam in New York.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: I bet they don't even have a mascot. They got
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: together characters from cartoons and video games, everyone from Mickey
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Mouse to law Acroft and who is very attractive by
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: the way she's a computer character. Yeah. Well no, I'm
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: talking about playing tomb Rater. Oh I never played. Yeah,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: when it first came out, you know, I played tomb
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: Rater and I was like, oh, I look at her
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: act kind of hut. She Well, she's she gets a
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: lot of stuff done. That's very attractive. That's true. That means, well,
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: she travels a lot, she's an independent person. Yeah, that's
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: what I meant. I was attracted to her mind in
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: her adventures. Uh So, anyway, they asked people in this study, Um,
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: how attractive do you think these characters are? Or how
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: repulsive do you think they are? And again there was
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: um a graph with a dip in it at a
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: certain point, as you would expect. Yep. Careful, careful, everybody.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: So if you're if you're a robot designer, right, one
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: of the things like even back in his essay written
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: in nine seventy, Masahiro Morey said, um, there's there's problems
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: here with movement. There's problems here with the smile. It
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: has something to do with the face, right, Um, and
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: it's somebody else said I don't remember who it was,
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: but there's there always seems to be a lag time
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: between how realistic a designer can make a robot and
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: how realistic a an engineer can make that robot look right,
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: and that that disconnected. Maury's mind was a big part
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: of the on Canny Valley, but he also seemed to
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: focus on the smile on the eyes and one of
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: the things that's at stake, like besides this just being
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: like an interesting topic of discussion, like, there are actual
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: real world implications for this whole thing, right, Like, if
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: you're a robot designer, you want to create something that's
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: not going to freak people out, because the whole purpose
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: of robots is to interact with humans, and you want
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: them to interact with humans. I should say life like
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: looking at robots, right, because like four motor companies ever
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: gonna buy an android that looks human to just work
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: on an assembly line when they can get the same
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: thing that does the same job cheaper when it just
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: looks like a robotic arm or something. Right, the whole
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: purpose of a lifelike looking robots because that robot is
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: being designed to interact with humans. And if you are
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: going to run into this spot, some people say it's
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: not even a valley. Some people think it's insurmountable a
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: cliff or a wall. So if you're gonna run up
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: against this, you want to figure out how to overcome
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: it because you don't want to creep people out with
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: your creations. Well, and you don't want to spend a
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: lot of money, um to develop a robotic Walmart greeter
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: at every store because it's it's happening like this is
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: coming people. Yeah, there's a robot called Geminoid F or
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: acterroid f depends on who you ask. I've also seen
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: he called Ellie, and she is out of this lab
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: by a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguro, and he is probably
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: the world's leading roboticist. If you've seen any life like android,
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: it probably came out of this guy's lab, right, And
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: she is starting to get out there in the world.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: She's been a debriefer of soldiers coming back from more
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: with PTSD, based on the idea that they might share
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: more with a robot that they knew was just a
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: robot than they would an actual human. Um. She's in
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: a play. She stars as an android, right. And then
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: there's Casper. There's a little robot called Casper. Yeah, Casper
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: is a robot boy with a great cause created to
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: help children with autism learn to read facial emotions. If
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: you look up photos of both of these giminoid, f
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: uh looks great and really like Ishiguro is doing great,
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: great work. Casper looks terrifying, right, and so Casper is creepy.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: But that's not his purpose at all, right, his purpose
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: is to like teach kids with autism how to connect.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: But if he's repelling them through this uncanny valley, he's
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: defeating the purpose. Well, they should go to Ishi Gurro
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: and say, hey, we have this great cause, can you
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: make us something that doesn't look like the stuff of nightmares?
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: Right exactly? I wonder if Casper has been um effective,
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: you know, I don't know. I don't know. Now I
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: feel bad I didn't look into that. Well, I just
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: I don't know. He's very creepy looking. I agree wholeheartedly.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: It's kind of like, no, he's not finished, get back
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: to the drawing board. Either that or and this is
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: what Morey said, like go the other way, like just
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: make him not um he himan at all, just cute
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: or approachable. So the robotists are not the only ones
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: who are facing this chuck. There is a a pretty
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: powerful moneyed contingent of people who are interested stakeholders in
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: overcoming the uncanny Valley, or at least figuring out if
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: it's totally insurmountable. And that is Hollywood. Yeah. Um, Hollywood
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: has a sort of a rich history of getting it
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: wrong when it comes to creepy c g I characters. Um.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: Pixar had their very first short film. Actually it's called
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: Tin Toy, uh, a little five minutes short, and they
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: showed it to this you know, this proceded toy story
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: and everything. Yeah, it was actually kind of like the
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: outline of toy stories plot. Yeah, but they showed it
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: to test audiences and they made the mistake of making
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: the baby Billy look too realistic, and everyone loved Tin
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Toy and everyone hated Billy. Yeah have you seen it?
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, he's pretty hateable for sure, and he
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: has the antagonist, but he he struck some chord with
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: viewers that that Pixar did not mean to strike. And
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: they actually, I mean, this is extraordinarily fortunate for Pixarre.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: This is very early on in their history. And um,
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: they they learned from it. Actually they're like, Okay, note
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: to self, don't try to make any of these characters life. Like,
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: let's go a different direction, and so they came up
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: with those um exaggerated features that we've all just come
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: to know and love. Yeah, which was a great, great
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: direction to go in, obviously, because they've had tons of
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: success with that model. Right, you can make the case
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: that it may have saved the company because other companies
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: and other movies, for sure, have not been nearly as fortunate. Yeah.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: One of the first big photo real computer animated movies
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: was Final Fantasy Colon the Spirits Within. You should never
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: have a colon in your movie title, by the way,
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: that was the first mistake. But this one was from
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: two thousand one and based on the video game, and
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: it was off putting to a lot of people, and
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: it was a big, big bomb for Columbia Pictures. And
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: but this is before Uncanny Valley had really been established,
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: before Maury's essay was translated, so reviewers didn't quite know
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: what to say. Now they would just say we've tumbled
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: into the Uncanny Valley again, but they would say things
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: like Peter Traver's great reviewer from Rolling Stone said, at first,
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: it's fun to watch the characters. Ellipsis ellipsips But what's
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: an ellipsis is that two of them, couple of them.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: mechanical quality in the movements, familiar voices emerging from the
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: mouths of replicants erect a distance. Yeah, so he's describing
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: young Canny Valley. He just didn't have the name of
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: it yet. Um. And then a couple of years later
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: the Polar Express, which became I think even more famous
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: than Final Fantasy as far as the Uncanny Valley goes.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: But again, it's like you said, you know, the reviewers
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: didn't know how quite to put their finger on it,
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: and I'm not quite sure how Final Fantasy was done,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: but I know that polar Express used similar um software
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: and hardware to what roboticists are using now, where it's
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: like motion capture, but rather than translating the motion to
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: the robot, it's translating the motion into like a digital
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: three D rendering of the character. Right, So polar Express
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: was really really expressive, but not quite there, so it
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: fell really hard in the Uncanny Valley, and um, I
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: think David Germaine of the Associated Press uh compared the
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: kids in this heartwarming family Christmas movie to the Children
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: from Village of the Damned, which is not what you want.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: It's not at all what the studio wanted, and I
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: think it lost a pretty decent amount of money. Yeah,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: there was another one of uh. And these are all,
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: by the way, courtesy of Robert Zemecas he really had
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: his He went all in on this technology. I don't
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: know why. I think he just I think sometimes you
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: as an artist, you can get so wrapped up and
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: the coolness of wow, look what we can do now
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: that you don't step back and look at what you're doing, like,
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: should should we be doing this? Because he also had
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: a part in the Bowolf movie in two thousand seven
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: that was a huge bomb. Um in The New York
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: Times said this about that people who are meant to
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: be enraged, who are at risk of plummeting to their deaths,
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: just look a little out of sorts. When it was over,
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: I felt relieved to be back in the company of
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: un creepy flesh and blood humans again. Sad and then uh,
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: just the Adventures of Tintin. Yeah, I really liked Tintin,
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: though I did too. I think Spielberg, I mean, there
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: is that Uncanny Valley a little bit, but the story
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: in the movie were so good he overcame that. I
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: think I was about to say, I think Spielberg has
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: come the closest to to overcoming that chasm of anybody.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: But did he do it through good storytelling or through
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: the eyes I I don't know. I don't know if
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: it I don't know if it was a combination of
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: the two. Um, I don't know, but it is extraordinarily,
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: it's an extraordit. So you know those that that that
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: stuff you'll see every once a while, which somebody does
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: like what Beavis and butt Head would actually look like
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: in real life or what Charlie Brown was in real life. Right,
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: So it's still has kind of got a cartoonish quality
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: to it. It's the same thing with the Tintin movie.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: But it was like it was as if you were
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: living in a dementia and where humans looked somewhat cartoonish.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: Is that making any sense or does that just make
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: the whole thing even harder to understand? No? I get that.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: So so he somehow was like, here, I'm not trying
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: to nail what humans look like. I'm going to take
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: you to another world where these people live and if
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: you lived in this world, you would look like this too.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: It's it's weird. It's like he he bridged an uncanny
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: valley that doesn't exist in this dimension. Yeah, he built
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: a temporary disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley. I think
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: the biggest example in recent years was, or the one
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: that got the most attention was in Rogue One. Did
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: you see that? The Star Wars movie? I haven't a
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: seen any of the new Star Wars ones except for
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: a seen the first six, I guess, but none of
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: the two new new ones. Uh. Well, in Rogue One,
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: they completely bring back to life Grand Moth Tarkin, who
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: was played by the deceased Peter Cushing, and they brought
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: him back as a character in this movie and in
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: the theater like when he when it first happens, he's
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: got his back to you and it's sort of in
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: the shadows and you're like, oh wow, like that's pretty cool.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: And I didn't know that they would do that, but
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: they they got too comfortable, I think, and uh showed
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: too much and gave him too many lines and too
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: much light, and then it became uncanny Valley. Oh yeah,
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: for sure. I think about poor Peter Cushing's family having
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: to see that. Yeah, I don't know how often they
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: just weep during that that movie. Well, I'm curious about
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: like life rights and image rights and stuff like that,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: if they had to get that cleared. I don't even
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: know that. I'm sure there's a backstory there. Cushing was
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: famously mellow that he would have taken a draw off
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: his DUBI and been like, that's whatever, man. Yeah, I
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: think he spent the last year of his life on
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: his weed farm in northern California. What about this Mars
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: Needs Moms. I had never ever heard of that movie,
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: and so I went and watched the trailer and it
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: still was like, I have no idea what this is. Yeah,
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: you know that comic strip bloom County. Well, you know,
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: I'm a huge, huge life along bloom County fan. Okay,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: so Burke, so maybe you know how to say the
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: last name. It's Berkeley breathed, her breathed, But I don't
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: know if I've ever heard it said out loud breath.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: It sounds nice. Let's go with that. So Berkeley brother,
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: the person, the guy who did bloom County. He wrote
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: a book, a children's book, called Mars Needs Moms, and
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: basically Mars had some sort of shortage of moms, so
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: the Martians came and kidnapped human moms and it was
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: up to the human kids to go get their moms
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: back from Mars. Right, pretty cute little premise, but they
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: took it and ran it through z Mecha's nightmare. Mill
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: Um Image Movers Digital was the was the trade name
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: of it, but everybody knew it's just steer clear of
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: this place, right, And this was like the Apex or
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: the what's the opposite of the Apex? The Valley, I guess,
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: so the deepest part of the c g I Valley
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: of the Uncanny Valley, right, it was what what the
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: stuff that they created? It was so off and just
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: so spectacularly and colostly off that when I guess Disney
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: came along and bought this company that came in looked
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: around and said, we're shutting you down. This movie is
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: that we're not doing this anymore. What you guys are
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: doing here is wrong, um, and you're all going to jail. Yeah,
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: here's my thoughts on that. I watched the trailer and
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: it didn't look any worse than any of the other
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: ones to me, and in fact I don't know the
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: character's names, but there's a kid and then there's this
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: one kind of chubby guy in Mars. The chubby guy
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: looked pretty good. Actually, I thought. I think this was
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: a victim. I bet the movie sucked really bad, and
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: I think it was the last straw the end of
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: all these Uncanny Valley failures. Yeah, because this again, this
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: is the same company that had created um Polar Express,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: the Nightmare Factory, and a Christmas Carol did not do
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: very well either, So yeah, I think it. It definitely
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: bore the brunt of its predecessors as well. I but
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: I thought this was as bad as it got. If
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: you ask me, I totally saw what what Disney saw
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: with this one. Anytime something is marked as the thing
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: that killed the thing, right, it's always just the last thing. Yeah,
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: you're right, you know, yeah, but it could have also
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: been the thing that saved the thing had they gotten
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: it right. You know, that's true. So, like I said,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: Mariy was like and every time I say Maury, now
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: unless I say it like Morty just saying Maury, think
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: I think of the Whigs, Salesman and Goodfellas is like
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: give me my money and ray leodis this in their
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: laughing because Morey's to pay falls off. Imagine that guy
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: is the guy who came up with the young Canny Valley. Okay,
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: it gives a full different spin too, right, So Maury says, um,
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: you just don't even try. Guys like you're never going
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: to be able to do this. Even if you can,
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: We're so far away from it. And this is the
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: vy he was saying it, and it still holds true.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: Now we're so far away from this that that just
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: maybe put your put your emphasis elsewhere. And the example
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: he gave was say, like a prosthetic hand, right, rather
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: than trying to create a lifelike prosthetic hand, that that
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: was in danger of creeping people out, which is the
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: opposite of what somebody wearing a prosthetic hand wants when
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: they're walking around the prosthetic hand. He said, you know,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: maybe choose some like like would well sanded beautifully grained
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: wood in the shape of a human hand. It gets
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: the point across this is my hand. I lost my hand,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: I don't have my hand, but there's nothing to be
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: creeped out about here. It's kind of beautiful. Looking, isn't it.
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: That was Maury's take, and a lot of people side
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: with him as well. As a matter of fact, you know,
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: I said, I think at the beginning that he was
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: already an established roboticist when he wrote The Uncanny Valley
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: in NINEV and he went on to teach a lot
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: of people roboticists or a lot of roboticists as well.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: And um, that very famous robot uh a s m
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: o Asmo, you know, the one I'm talking about. He
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: was one of the first ones that could jog in place.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: And he's kind of humanoid for sure, but very cute,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: all white, shiny lacquer plastic. You've seen him before. Um.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: He was created by one of Morey's students, who clearly
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: subscribe to Maury's theory that you you're not gonna you're
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: not gonna overcome the Uncanny Valley. So just make these
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: things exaggerated and non human like, and you'll you'll have
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: people love your robot. Yeah. I think that's a good tech. Yeah,
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna take another break here and then
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: come back and finish up with a little bit. We're
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: gonna take a step back and just talk generally about creepiness,
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: all right, So I promised that we would talk about creepiness.
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: So that's what we'll do. The creeps such a great phrase.
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: Everyone says, it gives me the creeps. It's just such
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: a just It's one of those phrases that sums things
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: up so perfectly. It's livid as a fresh bruise. And um,
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: we have Charles Dickens to thank for this, evidently because
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: he gets credit for using the creeps. Uh In David
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: Copperfield in people had had this feeling before, this sort
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: of pleasn't off you know what it feels like to
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: get the creeps. But they said things like eel like
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: or clammy. Not bad, not bad. But if you said
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: that thing makes me feel eel like today, people be like,
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: what the heck are you talking about? Right? I think
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: also you would use that to describe somebody who gave
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: you the creeps as well, like that guy is really clammy,
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: you know what I mean? Sure? Well, that means you're
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: touching them though, like like Peter Lori would be clammy
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: or eel like in some of his characters. You know,
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: Peter Lourie, how do you too? Um, So everybody understands
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: that there is such thing as the creeps, right, but
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: we don't understand why we get the creeps still to
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: this day, and again this is important and relates it
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: on Canny Valley because another way to put the creeps
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: is negative affinity. Remember affinity was the x axis, and
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: when the valley dropped down below the x axis, you
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: dipped into negative affinity. You dip into the creep the
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: creeps exactly right. So you talked about um Ernst yinch Yeah, yeah,
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: I get it. It was probably the first person to
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: actually sit down and study the creeps or creepiness creepy himself.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I think he was just kind of
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: a neat thinking man, right, So yinch Man, I like
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: saying his name a lot more now. He wrote an
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: essay in nineteen o six called on the Psychology of
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: the Uncanny and that's the English translation. Um. The German
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: word he used, like you said, is unheimlich, Is that right? Um?
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: Not unheimlich? Unheimlich Okay, better, thank you? Uh? He he
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: used that word, And unheimlich is a variation of the
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: word heimlich um, which is not just to say the maneuver,
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: It means something else entirely which is homie, we're familiar, right,
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: Unheimlich is the opposite of that. It's something strange and foreign,
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: and very frequently is translated into uncanny here in the West,
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: here here in in England. Yeah, and he he has, uh,
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: he thought a lot about this. And one of the
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: things that he noted, which I think thought was pretty interesting,
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: was that people that he thought were more intellectually discriminating, um,
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: are more prone to have these uncanny experiences because they're
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: critical thinkers about the world. Right, So, uh that makes sense,
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: Like just they pay attention maybe a little more, Yeah,
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: or they're curious, like they're they're like, why am I
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: creeped out? Let me get to the bottom of this,
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: rather than oh I'm creeped out him and then go
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: eat the whole thing at chips ahoy and hide under
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: the covers. Uh. He He also actually went even further
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: and said, it's it's possible that all of humanities knowledge
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: has been accrued over these millions of years from the
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: the people investigating what'spah this creepiness. It's a pretty weird
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: and neat theory of knowledge. Well, yeah, and speaking of theories,
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: there are a bunch of theories on creepiness, UM and
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: why this happens, and I think they're all pretty interesting.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: The first one is called pathogen avoidance theory, and we
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: talked earlier about evolution and UM, this one kind of
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: fits into that bucket. Uh. Basically a warning that we
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: have evolved to have in our brain. It says that
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: person is off, they are diseased. Even you don't want
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: to go near them, you want to avoid that pathogen.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: It makes sense. Yeah, it's pretty pretty approachable. Um. There's
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: another one that I've seen that I think fairly recent,
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: and it's the idea that things give us the creeps when, um,
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: when they're trying to nonverbally mimic people and so, like
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: a robot doesn't do it, so we're like, oh, that's unsettling.
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: Or somebody who you would describe as clammy or eel
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: like maybe overdes it a little bit, like they're trying
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: to fit in. It's not natural to them and that
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: can give you the creep as well. That makes sense,
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: but it doesn't really encompass everything. It's definitely not a
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: unified theory of creepiness. It just seems to kind of
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: inhabit one corner of the creepy spectrum. Yeah, there's another
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: one called violation of expectation. Um, this is like, you know,
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: you've shaken hands with thousands of people over your life.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: But if you go and you shake a hand and
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: you don't know that you're going to get a prosthetic,
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: can it may give you the creeps? Uh? And that
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: is probably very fleeting because you might just say, oh, okay,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: well it doesn't give me the creeps now, but it's
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: just unexpected for me. And actually you said that was fleeting, right, Chuck.
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: So I think it was uniche or somebody who said
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: that creepiness what gives us the creeps one time might
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: not of us the creeps later on, which will kind
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: of come into play later. Like Ernst n basically he
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: laid the groundwork for the study of creepiness and it
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: seems to have gotten a lot of it right right
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: out of the gate. Yeah. And like you said, if
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: it if it doesn't give you the creeps later, then
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: that would fit neatly into the violation of expectation because
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: then you can change your expectation right exactly. Yes. Yes,
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: another one's mortality salience theory. Yeah, this one, MORI and uh,
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: Freud both subscribed to and it basically said that, um,
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: we when we encounter like a robot or an automaton
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: in Freud's day, um, they remind us of dead people,
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: which in turn gets our mind to thinking about how
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: we're going to die one day. And so all of
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: a sudden we find ourselves in the uncanny valley right,
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: which again raises another sorry for the sidetrack, but raises
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: another of Unch's points. Um is uncanny nous inherent in
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: the object? Or is it inside the observer who's experiencing
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: the creeps or uncanny nous? I think it's in the observer. Yeah,
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: I think it is, too, which would explain why it
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: can go away when you when you come to experience
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: it again, like this, when you go through that, when
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: you shake the same prosthetic hand again, it's not creepy
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: the second time. It might even be interesting, or why
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: some people might not experience it at all. Like someone
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: might sit there and see a doll and the doll's
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: head turns and looks at them, and they're like, neat,
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: how much for that doll? Which means you've just met
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: a serial killer? And then the dolls creeped out after that, Uh,
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: this one, I like the UM even though I can
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: never say this word for some reason, and throw po morphism, dehumanization, dichotomy,
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: which basically as we attribute these human attributes to the
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: robot until we realize that they don't have them. Right. So, like,
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: we're looking at this robot that looks like a person.
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: We're saying, oh, look, it's just like a human. And
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: they're walking and they're talking and they're smiling, and then
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: oh god, look at their eyes. Their eyes are dead.
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: Look at the eyes. They don't they don't have any
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: internal thoughts at all. They're not human. And then all
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: of a sudden, on Canny Valley, which is a little
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: bit about expectation too. I think there's a crossover a little,
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: I think, and so creepiness, I think, especially the modern
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: incarnation of creepiness. This is my These are my thoughts.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: They seem to be They represent a crossroads right where evolutionarily,
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: creepiness I think UM was probably it's alerts us. We're
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: on alert when something's creeping us out. We're really focused
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: on that thing, right then. But we're also bound by
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: society not to just turn and run from anything that
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: could conceivably be a threat. You can also take it
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: a little further and say that evolutionarily speaking, it would
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: not make sense for us to turn and run from
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: every single thing that could conceivably be a threat before
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: we've identified it as a threat, because we would be
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: using up a lot of calories and energy, and we
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: would have to find more food than we do. Would
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: be inefficient. Right, So we're kind of bound socially to
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: stand in place until we identify something as a threat
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: or not, in which case, during this period, that's when
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: we experience creepiness. Yeah, and I think everyone has experienced this. Um.
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: Like you're in a coffee shop or something and like
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: some super creepy dude comes in, and if you're liking me,
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: you're just like, um, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: keep my eye on that guy. I'm not I'm not
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: gonna bolt and run, but it might stay near the door. Sure,
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: you know, I might get my car keys ready, exactly right. Uh,
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: it is, it's this weird social contract, um, And you
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: know I feel bad for people that just inherently look
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: a little creepy. Well, yeah, let's talk about that. So
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: the was these there were these researchers from Knox College
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: who did what they build is the first empirical study
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: of creepiness. And this is in two thousand sixteen. And um,
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: it was an online survey, very little heavy lifting, but
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: it was a pretty pretty cool survey. It was in
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: four parts, and UM. What they found overall was that, Yeah,
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: physical characteristics, physical traits that are almost stereotypically linked to
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: creepy people do have an effect. They are creepy. Um,
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: as far as as the participants in this study are concerned.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: So the first section said, hey, you know what, what
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: is the likelihood that this person is creepy? And there's like,
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: you know, descriptions of them with forty four different behaviors. Right. Um.
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: And the second part was participants rated the creepiness of
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: twenty one different occupations. Um. The third section it said,
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: list two hobbies that you think are creepy. They only
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: needed to it was open ended to. And then the
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: last section, um, the participants said whether or not they
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: agreed with fifteen statements about the nature of creepy people. Yeah.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: And overall, again like they found like, yes, if you
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: have physical traits that people find creepy, like bulging eyes
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: or you lick your lips a lot, or you know,
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: your you arch your fingers and then just kind of
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: tap them together a lot. Okay, it's kind of creepy,
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: but the Knox researchers concluded that those aren't creepy necessarily
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: in and of themselves. It's when it's in conjunction with
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: other creepy behavior that somebody comes across as creepy. Right. Uh.
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: And of course, the one behavior they put in here
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: I think that was probably universally creepy was someone who
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: persistently steers the conversation towards a sexual topic, right, yeah,
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: you don't, you don't do that. They they also found
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: they also found of participants, and this is like, I
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: think eight hundred and forty one people of them said
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: that men were more likely to be creepy than women.
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: I think that's generally true. Um. I don't remember getting
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: the creeps a lot in my life by uh, strictly
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: from the appearance of a woman, right, but a lot
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: of dudes on a weekly basis give me the creeps.
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: But we we should say so. There's a website called
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: girl dot com g u r l dot com and
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: they went on to read it and found a thread
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: somewhere that they wrote a blog post about and now
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: we're reporting on it, so it's really come full circle.
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: But it was a threat about how women can be creepy,
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: and it was written by dudes, and um, there are
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: some things that apparently are universally creepy among boys with women, right,
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: Women that are too needy can be creepy. Women who
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: use baby talk too much, or who quote never leave
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: a guy alone. Yeah, I just I'm just gonna go
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: ahead and dump that right into the trash ben. That's
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: my only comment on that. Okay, what about e harmony?
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you come home and Glenn closes in
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: your kitchen boiling your pet bunny, well, that's a threat. Yeah,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: that's not even creepy. That's just a threat. Although I
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: will say in Fatal Attraction, the the scene where she
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: is sitting there clicking the light on and off, listening
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: to Mad and Butterfly, that was that was kind of creepy.
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: I was trying to think of like a creepy woman,
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: and I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well, these
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: are creepy behaviors, though, you know, not like Glenn cost
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: Close walked into the room and you're like, oh, I
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: don't know about that, right, right, right, there's a difference
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: right there. There's a difference between genuine creepiness and just
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: doing creepy things. I think it is much harder for
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: women to be creepy than men. Cannot think of a
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: single actual creepy woman I'd like to hear from people, though. Yeah. Uh,
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: e harmony. So we talked about Reddit. Now we're gonna
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: talk about e harmony. They had an article where they
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: wrote advice to dudes. It was called how to Avoid
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: the creep Zone, um, and their advice was for your
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: hobbies that you list to be just sort of vanilla,
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: don't like and even if you are an amateur taxidermist,
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: maybe don't put that down right. They said, it can
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: be attractive for a guy to have an off the
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: beaten path hobby, and one of the examples they gave
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: of an off the beaten path hobby was collecting punk records.
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: But don't get weirder than that. Yeah, and if you
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: know taxidermy in and of itself, some people might say
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: a super creepy. We did an episode on that. Other
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: people might say, no, it's just just beautiful artwork. But
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: Norman Bates was in a taxidermy for a reason. In
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: Psycho it was unsettling. Yeah, you know, yeah, and so
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: um there the Knox people who carried out this survey,
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: the Knox University researchers, they basically said, here's what we
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: think it is. Here's creepiness explained. And what they explained
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: was what can be called is the threat ambiguity um theory. Yeah,
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: this this one, I think we kind of put a
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: cherry on top on this one. Yeah, we really did
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: like it. It's just basically where you are creeped out
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: by something because your hackles are raised right then, and
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: it's because you haven't determined whether that things a threat
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: or not. Right. There's another one though that I subscribe to.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: I think it is finally the unified theory of creepiness.
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: I think it covers everything. And it's called the category
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: ambiguity theory. Yeah. That was Now did David Livingstone Smith
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: make this up or was he just champion this? I
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: think he made it up because he wrote about the
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: Knox researchers and said, what they're talking about you can
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: call threat ambiguity category or threat ambiguity theory with category
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: ambiguity theory. He didn't cite anybody else, so it seemed
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: to be his own construct. Yeah, so this is the idea.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: It's sort of like the threat ambiguity in that there
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: is some confusion, but it's not a threat like I
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: think this dude in the coffee shop is gonna kill me.
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: It's more like I don't know how to categorize that guy,
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: and that freaks me out. And it's based on what's
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: called um essential is um right, where if you are
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: a member of a species of animal, whether human or
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: raccoon or tiger, there's something about you where there's some
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: collection or set of things about you that that are
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: totally unique to your species. It's something you possess because
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: you remember that species, and because you remember that species,
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: you possess these things, and it can be very difficult
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: to put your finger on it, but it's just one
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: of those things that you know when you see it,
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: or no, when you don't see it right, and there
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: are clear borders between these things. You either have this
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: essence fully or you don't have it at all. You're
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: lacking and you're missing it and something's really wrong. So
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: in this article he used UM the example of a
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: wax dummy. Yeah, have you ever been to like Madame
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: Tusso's um, I find that the ones and again with
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: the eyes, the ones that work the best, or the
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: ones where they have sunglasses on. Oh yeah again Michael Jackson,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: that's right. But the whole point with these wax dummies
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: with the eyes is they're fixed. They're not moving around.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: The facial expression is locked in. Um, the skin itself.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: You know, you can only do so much. And Madame
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: Tussos and museums like that are the best of the best,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: and they do look pretty good. But that's the whole
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: point with the Uncanny Valley is you can't get there
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: and say we're fine. It's that one per cent that
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: still gives people the creeps exactly. And that's and it
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: sums up everything, like the threat ambiguity could fall into this,
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: whether you're talking about robots, whether you're talking about a
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: half dog half lizard combo. Which living stone sites are
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: living stones smith sites? Yeah, a dessert would be creepy
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: when you saw it, But so things that are a
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: threat are creepy. But there's also things that are creepy
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: that aren't a threat. And this category ambiguity theory figured
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: it out. So if that's true, Chuck and David Livingstone
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: Smith figured out what is the basis of creepiness. We
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: finally have the independent variable licked and massa hiro Morty's
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: Uncanny Valley graph and we can get to work. Is
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: he still around? Yeah? Yes, when that's happy about all this?
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: I get the impression that he's kind of like just whatever,
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: gone off on his own little thing, and he's fine.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: He wrote it in v after all, you know, I
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: mean most fifty years ago, so he's probably up there.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: Uh you anything else? I got nothing else? Good ones? Yeah,
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: we should say this was based originally on a grabsto article.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: But if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: come read that grab Sto article. You can type Uncanny
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: Valley and the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: And since I said search bars, time for listener mail. Well,
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: and today it's a very special listener mail. This is
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: Josh edition because you picked out a very special one.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: I love this one. I'm gonna butcher the dude's name,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: but that's right, take it away. It's a good one. Okay,
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this one email from a real Irish historian,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: and it feels pretty good to come out of a job.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah maybe, Okay, Hi guys, I'm a big fan of
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: the show. It's informative and insightful, and I find myself
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: interested in things that I never looked twice at before.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: One subject that I'd always found fascinating was the correlation
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: between the Native American Choctaw tribe and the people of Ireland.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: I didn't realize that was a thing that you at all.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: This is a story which isn't well known, okay, which
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: isn't well known outside of some areas of Ireland and
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: of course within the tribe. But it's a really good
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: story of solidarity between two groups of people, despite being
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: thousands of miles apart. Less than twenty years after the
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: Trail of Tears, which forcibly displaced thousands of natives, the
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: Great Famine hit Ireland. During this time, as you know,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: Ireland was colonized by the British and the people of
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: Ireland were treated poorly due to the common misconception that
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: Irish Catholics were lower caliber of human uh. He goes
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: on to to give more examples, but just suffice to
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: say it was not good for the Irish people. During
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: the famine, words spread to America and to the Choctaw tribe.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: They sympathy eased with the Irish people so much that
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: only fifteen years after the Trail of Tears, they donated
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: seven hundred and ten dollars during eighteen forty five to
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: send to Ireland as part of a relief fund. This
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: is estimated to be roughly sixty eight thousand dollars in
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: today's money. This was greatly appreciated by the Irish people
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: and after the famine the bond continued. In Cork, we
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: have a sculpture honoring the tribute of the Choctaw people,
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: and in nineteen ninety members of the tribe came to
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: Ireland and walked the Famine Walk in Mayo to replicate
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: the walk that starving people made to ask the landlord
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: for help. In nine in Irish Commemoration group walked from
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: Oklahoma to Mission to replicate the Trail of Tears and
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: raised seven hundred thousand dollars to help poverty in Africa.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: These two groups continue to work together and to this
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: day our President has declared an honorary member of the
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: Choctaw tribe. Along with the Quakers, who fed Irish people
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: to the point that their members ended starving themselves. The
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: Choctaw tribe remained some of the unsung heroes of the
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: famine story of Ireland. Sorry it went on so long.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: I'm an Irish historian, so I tend to waffle. Love
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: the show. Best of luck with yourselves, Uh, Roison kill
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: Roy fan, fantastic, great story. Thanks a lot, Roison. I'm
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: quite sure that's not the actual pronunciation of your name,
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: because there's a lot of accent marks over letters there
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: normally aren't. Um, So I apologized for that, but I
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: nailed your last name. I'm positive of it. And Josh
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: Clark three and a half stars, not bad out of
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: three and a half? Right, remember what was star search
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: the four stars? Oh? I don't remember. I just just
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: now remember there was such thing as Starson. Uh. Well, okay,
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: well you take the in part, Chuck, since I took
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: listener mail. Oh geez uh, thanks for listening. Um Hey,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with us, you
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: can find Josh at josh um Clark on Twitter and
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: me uh in Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant, or
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: you can go to our official pages. Stuff you should know, podcasts,
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: what else? Uh, let's see if they want to send
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: us an email. Oh yeah, email us at stuff podcast
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com and have a good day.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: Is that what you say? That's good enough? All right?
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: it how stuff works dot com.