Abstract
This paper extends Mori’s (IEEE Robot Autom Mag 19:98–100, 2012) uncanny valley-hypothesis to include technologies that fail its basic criterion that uncanniness arises when the subject experiences a discrepancy in a machine’s human likeness. In so doing, the paper considers Mori’s hypothesis about the uncanny valley as an instance of what Heidegger calls the ‘challenging revealing’ nature of modern technology. It introduces seeming autonomy and heteronomy as phenomenological categories that ground human being-in-the-world including our experience of things and people. It is suggested that this categorical distinction is more foundational than Heidegger’s existential structures and phenomenological categories. Having introduced this novel phenomenological distinction, the paper considers the limits of Mori’s hypothesis by drawing on an example from science fiction that showcases that uncanniness need not only be caused by machines that resemble human beings. In so doing, it explores how the seeming autonomy-heteronomy distinction clarifies (at least some of) the uncanniness that can arise when humans encounter advanced technology which is irreducible to the anthropocentrism that shapes Mori’s original hypothesis.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The uncanny valley has also been explored in other fields including animal studies (Steckenfinger and Ghazanfar 2009), human-avatar relations (Cheetham et al. 2009) and studies on human interaction with static objects (Misselhorn 2009).
For more than three decades, Mori’s hypothesis was largely exempted from empirical scrutiny (cf. Brenton et al. 2005). In recent years, however, many studies have explored the uncanny valley but the results are mixed. Some verify it (see, for instance, MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006; MacDorman and Entezari 2015) while others merely find partial evidence of its existence (Piwek et al. 2014; Rosenthal-von der Pütten and Krämer 2014). Nevertheless, most roboticists acknowledge that the uncanny valley has to be taken into consideration and, at best, avoided since its resulting discomfort and eeriness affects how we perceive and interact with robots. The diverging empirical results have given rise to different understandings concerning the nature of the uncanny valley. Consequently, some roboticists even hold that there are several valleys (cf. Kätsyri et al. 2015).
‘Affinity’ (Shinwakan) is a central concept in Mori’s thesis but it lacks a clear definition. Consequently, scholars are somewhat confused about the concept’s “precise nature” and meaning as some take ‘familiarity’ to be a more fitting term (Moore 2012, p. 1). In the following, I consider ‘affinity’ to designate an agent’s positive attitude towards a worldly entity based on the agent’s implicit understanding of the entity in question. In being positive in this rudimentary sense, affective attitudes allow the agent to engage in purposeful dealings with things, people, robots etcetera. For instance, I have a basic sense of affinity towards my bicycle in the sense that I expect it (and bikes in general) to appear, feel and function in certain ways (e.g. to accelerate when I push the pedals; to stop when I use the breaks). This basic affinity involves a degree of familiarity since I must already have experienced bikes in order to know how they work and, consequently, be able to have affinity towards them.
Others have explored the relation between Mori and Heidegger (see, for instance, Mangan 2015; Withy 2015). But whereas Mangan primarily focuses on the existential anxiety of human existence, Withy presents a negative claim by (somewhat off target) flagging that “Mori’s essay and the subsequent discussions of the uncanny in robotics serve to raise the question of what the uncanny feeling is and how it arises. None answers the question” (Withy 2015, p. 14).
On a sidenote, this does not mean that we only engage with things in an immediate way. For as Heidegger asserts, “the less we just stare at the thing called hammer the more we take hold of it and use it, the more original our relation to it becomes and the more undisguisedly it is encountered as what it is, as a useful thing” (ibid., p. 69). Thus, Heidegger attempts to account for how a “category of objective Being could be constructed or abstracted out of the primitive system of appropriateness and significances which makes up the world in which we always already find ourselves” (Brandom 2005, p. 217). Following Brandom, this abstraction involves a move from asserting things in terms of ‘readiness-to-hand’ to ‘presence-at-hand’. While the former concerns things “that a neo-Kantian would describe as having been imbued with human values and significances” (ibid., p. 214), the latter is “objective” in the sense “not of decontextualization, but of recontextualization” (ibid., p. 227). On this view, naturalistic accounts—such as those by theorists who treat robots as entities with objective traits (e.g. Brooks 1991; Pfeifer 1996; Schaal et al. 2003)—always derive from pre-reflective engagements with the world.
Following Steiner and Stewart’s naturalistic definition, heteronomy “consists in receiving the principles that govern the action of the system from external resources, whose existence and content are largely independent of the system in question” (Steiner and Stewart 2009, p. 529).
The notions of autonomy and heteronomy were originally coined by Immanuel Kant.
This kind of objectivization characterizes, for instance, Hofmann’s (2017) account on the fundamental differences between human beings and robots. Endorsing Dretske’s (1995) theory on ‘historical versions of representationalism’, Hofmann posits that we have no reason to attribute phenomenal consciousness to robots because they have a radically different evolutionary history. In being naturalistic, however, Hofmann’s account has nothing to say about how humans pre-reflectively perceives and engages with robots. From a phenomenological life-world perspective, what matter is not what robots have (in terms of minds, consciousness etc.) but how they are perceived by humans.
I consider it suitable to use HAL as an example for the following reasons. First, as Moore observes, the uncanny valley has already “entered into popular culture” with, for instance, animated films (e.g. ‘Polar Express’ with Tom Hanks) and Geminoid F, the world’s first android actress (Moore 2012, p. 1). 2001 is no exception. As I aim to show in the following, the film provides important insights into the dynamics of the uncanny valley that makes it relevant to consider. Second, as shown by Dreyfus (2009) and Wiltshire (2015), examples from the popular media are used to inform philosophical debates as well as to render novel hypotheses.
References
Brandom R (2005) Heidegger's categories in Being and Time. In: Dreyfus HL, Wrathall MA (eds) A companion to heidegger. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp 214–232
Breazeal C (2003) Toward sociable robots. Robot Auton Syst 42(34):167–175
Brenton H, Gillies M, Ballin D, Chatting D (2005) The uncanny valley: does it exist? Proceedings of the 19th British HCI Group annual conference
Brooks RA (1991) Intelligence without representation. Artif Intell 47:139–159
Cheetham M, Suter P, Jäncke L (2011) The human likeness dimension of the “uncanny valley hypothesis”: behavioral and functional MRI findings. Front Hum Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00126
Cheetham M, Suter P, Jäncke L (2014) Perceptual discrimination difficulty and familiarity in the Uncanny Valley: more like a “Happy Valley”. Front Psychol. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01219
Ciechanowski L, Przegalinska A, Magnuski M, Gloor P (2018) In the shades of the uncanny valley: an experimental study of human–chatbot interaction. Future Gener Comput Syst. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.01.055
Collins H, Clark A, Shrager J (2008) Keeping the collectivity in mind? Phenomenol Cognit Sci 7(3):353–374
Dahlstrom DO (2013) The Heidegger dictionary. Bloomsbury Publishing, London
Dretske F (1995) Naturalizing the mind. MIT Press, Cambridge
Dreyfus H (2009) Heidegger on gaining a free relation to technology. In: Kaplan DM (ed) Readings in the philosophy of technology. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, pp 25–34
Fodor J (1981) Representations. MIT Press, Cambridge
Gahrn-Andersen R (2017) Beyond Latour and Heidegger or: how to avoid conceptual gaps when clarifying human sociality. RASK Int J Lang Commun 46:3–18
Gahrn-Andersen R, Cowley SJ (2017) Phenomenology and sociality: how extended normative perturbations give rise to social agency. Intellectica 67:379–398
Gray K, Wegner DM (2012) Feeling robots and human zombies: mind perception and the uncanny valley. Cognition 125(1):125–130
Gray K, Young L, Waytz A (2012) Mind perception is the essence of morality. Psychol Inq 23(2):101–124
Haselager WFG (2005) Robotics, philosophy and the problem of autonomy. Pragmat Cognit 13(3):515–532
Heidegger M (1977) The question concerning technology and other essays. Harper and Row publishers, New York
Heidegger M (2010) Being and time. SUNY Press, Albany
Hofmann F (2017) Could robots be phenomenally conscious? Phenomenol Cognit Sci. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9528-9
Huang C, Bilge M (2016) Anticipatory robot control for efficient human-robot collaboration. Proceedings from HRI '16 The Eleventh ACM/IEEE international conference on human robot interaction: 83–90
Husserl E (1989) Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological psychology—second book. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht
Kätsyri J, Förger K, Mäkäräinen M, Takala T (2015) A review of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eeriness. Front Psychol 6:390
MacDorman KF, Entezari SO (2015) Individual differences predict sensitivity to the uncanny valley. Interact Stud 16(2):141–172
MacDorman KF, Ishiguro H (2006) The uncanny advantage of using androids in cognitive and social science research. Interact Stud 7:297–337
Malafouris L (2013) How things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement. MIT Press, Cambridge
Mangan B (2015) The uncanny valley as fringe experience. Interact Stud 16(2):193–199
Maturana HR, Varela FJ (1980) Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht
Merleau-Ponty M (2010) Phenomenology of perception. Routledge, Oxon
Moore RK (2012) A Bayesian explanation of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ effect and related psychological phenomena. Sci Rep 2(864):1–5
Mori M (2012) The uncanny valley. IEEE Robot Autom Mag 19(2):98–100
Pfeifer R (1996) Building “Fungus Eaters”: design principles of autonomous agents. Proceedings of the fourth international conference on simulation of adaptive behavior SAB 96: 61–66
Piwek L, McKay LS, Pollick FE (2014) Empirical evaluation of the uncanny valley hypothesis fails to confirm the predicted effect of motion. Cognition 130:271–277
Rojcewicz R (2006) The gods and technology: a reading of Heidegger. SUNY Press, Albany
Rosenthal-von der Pütten A, Krämer NC (2014) How design characteristics of robots determine evaluation and uncanny valley related responses. Comput Hum Behav 36:422–439
Rossmanith N, Costall A, Reichelt AF, López B, Reddy V (2014) Jointly structuring triadic spaces of meaning and action: book sharing from 3 months. Front Psychol 5:1390
Schaal S, Ijspeert A, Billard A (2003) Computational approaches to motor learning by imitation. Philos Trans Biol Sci 358(1431):537–547
Schatzki TR (2005) Early Heidegger on Sociality. In: Dreyfus HL, Wrathall MA (eds) A Companion to Heidegger. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp 233–247
Tye M (2017) Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious? Oxford University Press, Oxford
Wiltshire T (2015) A prospective framework for the design of ideal artificial moral agents: insights from the science of heroism in humans. Mind Mach. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-015-9361-2
Ziemke T (2008) On the role of emotion in biological and robotic autonomy. Biosystems 91(2):401–408
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gahrn-Andersen, R. Seeming autonomy, technology and the uncanny valley. AI & Soc 37, 595–603 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01040-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01040-9