Introduction

Abstract

The ‘Tamagotchi effect’ refers to an emotional attachment to machines, robots or even software. It betrays a tendency to anthropomorphise things that mimic human behaviour or which use automated knowledge processing.¹ Decades before the Tamagotchi effect was recognised, however, robotics professor Masahiro Mori observed that, despite initially prompting positive responses, increasing similarity to humans in machines provoked not emotional attachment but sudden revulsion.² Although this quickly abated, at the lowest point of a graph that represented these reactions in a ‘valley’ curve, the associations with corpselike similarities acquired ‘zombie’ connotations if the robot moved. Linked to a notion of the uncanny explored first by Ernst Jentsch (1906) and developed by Sigmund Freud (1919), Mori’s observation became known as the ‘uncanny valley’ hypothesis.³