The Man Who Mistook His Girlfriend for a Robot

Indeed, despite its status as dogma, the Uncanny Valley is nothing more than a theory. "We have evidence that it's true, and evidence that it's not," says Sara Kiesler, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies human-robot interaction. She calls the debate "theological," with both sides arguing with firm convictions and little scientific evidence, and says that the back-and-forth is most intense when it comes to faces. "I'd like to test it," she says, "with talking heads."


In a pivotal 2001 paper in Science, Olaf Sporns of
Indiana University in Bloomington and six other leading roboticists described a new breed of robots that navigate the world and learn on their own. The new bots, which include Sporns's Darwin V, have mobile bodies and sensors that let them perceive their environment, much as we do. They're endowed with a developmental program that starts learning at birth. And they need human caretakers to teach them what they need to know about the world. As Triesch, who programs his robots on similar principles, says, "We're getting more into raising robots like children."


It will take decades at least to raise robots that are as smart and independent as we are, but the work has begun. Robots that learn on their own, robots that walk, robots that socialize with people, are all now in various stages of development. "A realistic autonomous humanoid is the Holy Grail," Sporns says. And, on the far side of the Uncanny Valley, robots would have a realistic, emotionally expressive face– a face that challenges robot-brain builders to make smarter robots, a face that fools us into treating a machine as if it were human. A face a person could grow attached to.


In his 2002 book, Flesh and Machines, leading MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, who oversaw Kismet's development, writes that "mankind's centuries-long quest to build artificial creatures is bearing fruit." We'll have different relationships with these machines than all earlier machines, he suggests. "The coming robotics revolution," Brooks writes, "will change the fundamental nature of our society."


On a cool, sunny day this past spring, Hanson, Nelson and I scrambled up and down the steep rises and canyons of Griffith Park, the ubiquitous Hollywood sign perched on a nearby hillside, the sky bright blue above the L.A. smog. We rested on a hilltop, where we could see for miles. Humans are facing an identity crisis, Hanson said, one that just a few people know about but many sense. "If we can mechanize what makes us human, that will make us feel like a mechanism," he said. Maybe that's what really lies behind the resistance to realistic humanoids, the reluctance to venture into the Uncanny Valley. And when we do cross over? At the February AAAS conference, someone asked Hanson his ultimate goal. A compassionate robot, he said: a peer, a friend. The goal, he said, is "letting it loose."




Dan Ferber is a freelance writer based in Urbana, Illinois. He is a contributing correspondent for Science.