Original Paper Discussing "Uncanny Valley" Now Available in English

Uncanny Baby via YouTube

The uncanny valley appears pretty frequently in these pages, at least in presentation — like the disembodied baby head above, for instance, or the wonderfully horrible Telenoid. These robots and others represent the gulf in our robot affinity that gapes open when machines approach a certain level of human likeness.

Masahiro Mori described this phenomenon 42 years ago, when he was a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His paper was largely unnoticed for decades, but more recently it has become a touchstone for robotics, especially as they become more lifelike. But the paper was never published in English in its entirety, for whatever reason. Now here it is, in a new translation approved by Mori and appearing in IEEE Spectrum.

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“I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley,” the new translation reads.

He also charts our affinities and lack thereof for still and moving objects, noting that our affinity is pretty high for a stuffed animal or a humanoid robot. But movement is key to our affinity — a humanoid robot would not move like a human, so it would be incredibly creepy, he says. “Imagine a craftsman being awakened suddenly in the dead of night. He searches downstairs for something among a crowd of mannequins in his workshop. If the mannequins started to move, it would be like a horror story,” he writes.

A still corpse is also down in the valley. At the deepest point: Zombies.

You can read the whole paper online here. IEEE Spectrum also has an interview with Mori, which you can read here.