The Iron Yuppie

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.

StockTheory.com :: Stock Picks so Fresh, They're From the Future. Uh, where am I missing the scam here? I always feel like I run across things like this, and never really pick up on why it doesn't work. It's very frustrating.