In “Navigating a social world with robot partners: A quantitative cartography of the Uncanny Valley,” Maya Mathur and David Reichling discuss the potential existence of an Uncanny Valley (UV) where imperfect human-likeness promotes dislike, and how this comes into play with the communication between humans and robots.

In the report, Mathur and Reichling carry out a study to see people’s reactions to robots of different levels. The robots ranged in levels of mechanical robots to nearly human-looking robots. While the general mechanical robots received extremely neutral reactions, as the robots further on gained more human-like characteristics it elicited extremely positive reactions. However, when the robots seemed to become almost more human than robots, the response became more and more negative.

I find the study to be extremely interesting, and I’m very curious as to what those robots that seemed more human than robots looked and acted like. Although I don’t believe robots will ever be an issue to the degree it is portrayed in movies and productions, it is interesting to see that we have been able to at least get to the point where we can create extremely human-like robots and I completely understand (from a personal perspective) why one would feel negative emotions towards something like this.