In to the Uncanny Valley
Joe Kloc, SEED Magazine Online
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/uncanny_valley/P2/
In Seed Magazine, Joe Kloc reports on PNAS findings that monkeys exhibit uncanny-valley-like-rejection of computerized/robotic monkeys. He also considers the history of (psuedo-) scientific explanations of uncanny valley, discussing Freud’s thoughts on the matter and the writings/works of roboticist Masahiro Mori. Kloc looks at how scientific explanations for the uncanny valley phenomenon are proceeding:
It has been suggested, for instance, that we avoid almost human figures because their peculiarities make them look sick, and we have developed an evolutionary mechanism for steering clear of pathogens. Another theory posits that we avoid figures with features slightly off from our own because they appear to be less-than-ideal mating material.
[Asif] Ghazanfar rejects all of these hypotheses. “What is really going on is much simpler,” he says. He believes the uncanny valley response occurs because an animal—human or nonhuman—is evolutionarily inclined to develop an expectation of what members of its species should look like, a supremely important skill, as it lets the animal know with whom it can and cannot interact.
In this sense, life-like robotic and computer-generated models occupy a weird middle ground in an animal’s mind: They are familiar enough for the animal to consider the possibility that they are of the same species, but strange enough that they don’t quite meet the expectation the animal has developed for members of its species. “Any face that violates that expectation is going to elicit the uncanny response,” Ghazanfar says.
Related Readings
David Foster Wallace lives on for an “Infinite Summer”
One giant book, 92 days, thousands of readers — and the world’s most ambitious reading group
Joe Coscarelli, Salon
David Foster Wallace on BookWorm
The terrible and sad impact of David Foster Wallace’s suicide caused us to want to remember him as he first appeared in the KCRW studios, fresh from the publication of his breakthrough novel, Infinite Jest. He was brilliant and charming—and his death is an enormous loss to American literature.
Interview with Wallace on KCRW
I’ve been re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer, along with the online book club.
I read parts of the novel a few years ago, and over the past few years I’ve became fond of his non-fiction. I’d decided I would read IJ again after listening to several Wallace interviews with Michael Silverblatt.
In Salon, Joe Coscarelli explains why it’s worth reading the tome with a online community. Coscarelli points to the unexpected and quirky topics that are raised when a large group interactively discusses the book:
On the hyperactive discussion forums, everyone from Wallace virgins to connoisseurs can offer interpretations and suggest topics (organized by the reading schedule in order to prevent spoilers). One reader wondered about the book’s setting — a futuristic hybrid of the United States, Canada and Mexico referred to as the Organization of North American Nations or by the acronym ONAN — sparking a conversation about the biblical character Onan and the notoriously wasteful practice of masturbation (i.e., onanism). Elsewhere, the novel’s reference to a “trial-size dove bar” sparked a debate about whether Wallace was referring to the chocolate or the soap. Eventually, a fan — whose source claims to have asked the author personally — announced definitively that it was, in fact, a reference to the ice-cream bar. Puzzling over this kind of pop cultural minutiae is all the more fun when reading along with a few thousand of your closest Internet friends.
Bits of Wallace writing uncover the dread and loneliness of living in a televised, mass media culture:
Of course, “Infinite Jest” also captures what Wallace called “a real American type of sadness” — that of “a white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated” guy who is successful, and yet terribly lonely and adrift. Which makes the idea of bringing so many people together for a communal reading of the book all that more meaningful. To some, the “book club” may seem like an archaic social experience — connotations of housewives and airport novels abound — but many Infinite Summer participants enjoy the, well, infinite possibilities of this Web project.
I also find that Wallace’s style, with footnote within footnotes and topic that loop out of control, fits well— or anticipates— how readers approach reading in a digital culture.
On hearing some trivial news this week, that Amazon had pulled Animal Farm and 1984 from the bundle of books that ship with the Kindle, I was reminded of the 60th anniversary of 1984. I also was prompted to read Jeremy Paxman’s recent words about Orwell essays in the Telegraph.
photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkonecny/
In praise of Orwell’s abilities as a writer:
Who would have imagined that sixteen hundred words in praise of the Common Toad, knocked out to fill a newspaper column in April 1946, would be worth reprinting sixty years later? But here it is, with many of the characteristic Orwell delights, the unglamorous subject matter, the unnoticed detail (”a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature”) the baleful glare, the profound belief in humanity. Because what the piece is really about, of course, is not the toad itself, but the thrill of that most promising time of year, the spring, even as seen from Orwell’s dingy Islington flat.
When he produced articles like this, hair-shirted fellow socialists got cross. Why wasn’t he spending his time promoting discontent, denouncing the establishment, glorifying the machine-driven future? It is a mark of his greatness that Orwell didn’t care. They – whoever they might be – cannot stop you enjoying spring. The essay ends: “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”
What makes Orwell great?
What Orwell’s experiences— both as figure of authority and as scullion— had given him was a lived understanding of the human condition. It was this grounding in reality that bestowed a more profound political instinct than would be available to some sloganeering zealot. He had acquired a capacity to empathise with the foot-soldiers of history, the put-upon people generally taken for granted, ignored or squashed by the great isms of one sort or another. It conferred upon him the remarkable ability to achieve what every journalist and essayist seeks.
Colin Tudge reviews Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, by Geoffery Miller in this month’s Literary Review.
Acknowledging the limitations of evolutionary psychology, Tudges writes about what Miller’s observations could mean for the marketing of products:
Evo psy has not had a good press, nor done itself many favours – but in principle Miller is surely right. As the Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky commented in 1973, ‘Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution’ – and biology includes animal and human psychology.
[...]
Evolutionary psychologists seek to identify what we really need to do to get by and produce offspring, and what states of mind we need, and to trace the selective forces, deep in our past, that have shaped our predilections and capabilities. Such thinking suggests that the Freudian and behaviourist psychology now applied to marketing and to the economy in general is too eccentric or crude by half. For all its apparent success, marketing does not really press the right buttons, and most economic systems do not make us happy even when they are intended to.
So in our consumer economy it’s assumed above all that people like stuff. ‘Darwinians’ (albeit the kind that Darwin would surely disown) then tell us that it is ‘natural’ above all to compete – consumers flaunting bigger and better stuff, and producers vying to produce more stuff than anyone else. Stir in the device of money – cash can buy anything – and we finish up with a dogfight, with everyone battling to outstrip the rest, and marketeers helping the process along.
Tudge concludes that Miller’s book argues for human goodness, but not for the goodness of marketers:
Miller’s thesis is encouraging. Basically we are nice – or at least we want to seem nice, and are impressed by niceness. Marketing would be far more successful if geared to the big six manifestations of niceness – we might call them virtues. Contrary to the general impression, marketing does not have to lead to rampant consumerism and a gobbling up of precious resources. Its techniques, rooted in accurate psychology, can just as soon promote good ideas as damaging ones.
But Tulge says,
Yet I am left uneasy. Is it really true that astute marketing could in practice sell good ideas as readily as big and shiny stuff? Marketing is expensive. So the people who can afford to do it best are those who set out, not to spread sweetness and light, but to make as much money as possible.
