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I read the most interesting concept in the New Yorker today. If I may quote:
One of the few guidelines from Breazeal
[a professor creating a human like robot] was
that Leo [the robot] not look too human, lest
he fall into the "uncanny valley," a concept
formulated by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese
roboticist.  Mori tested people's emotionsal
responses to a wide variety of robots, from
non-humanoid to completely humanoid.  He found
that the human tendency to empathize with
machines increases as the robot becomes more
human.  But at a certain point, when the robot
becomes too human, the emotional
sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes
its place.  People began to notice not the
charmingly human characteristics of the robot,
but the creepy zombielike differences.
What an amazing concept! And to be honest, it sounds entirely plausible. It's like a club sandwhich that you get in a foreign country. At one point, it's their own take on the club sandwhich, and the egg or butter or whatever they've added is a charming new flavor. But if it's too close, and still not accurate, then it's just a very bad club sandwhich. Not to get to philosophical about this, but one can derive an enormous amount of power from this thought, simply by ensuring that whatever you are creating or involved with makes the clear distinction between what it emulates and what it is. A cat isn't a bad dog, it's a cat which shares some similarity to a dog.