The Uncanny in the Digital Age

The digital age has brought to us a new kind of relationship: the human being and the humanoid machine. Researchers have discovered an interesting phenomenon that arises when a person encounters a robot, android, or other artificially intelligent being who in many ways comes very close to seeming human, but falls just short of the mark. It was first identified by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori (1970) and later called the uncanny valley by Jasia Reichardt (1978). Many of us might have experienced this phenomenon when watching animated movies. As long as the characters seem somewhat human but still artificial, we feel comfortable. But when such beings appear very real while deviating almost imperceptibly from a perfect human likeness, our comfort level suddenly drops into the uncanny valley. Something about the creature does not seem right. People feel revulsion or find the experience eerily disturbing. Similarly, unsophisticated robots in movies that act or look somewhat like a real person can be delightful companions, but when very human-like androids do the slightest thing that make us suspect they are machines, the movie director pushes us into the creepy sensation of the uncanny valley.

The uncanny was discussed as early as 1906 by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in his essay “The Psychology of the Uncanny.” He focused on a story written by the horror and phantasy author Ernest Hoffman in which a man falls in love with a woman who is actually an automaton doll invented by a scientist. Also an admirer of Hoffman’s mastery of the uncanny in literature, Freud (1919) later elaborated on Jentsch’s concept in his article “Das Unheimliche,” which translates as “the opposite of what is familiar.” Rather than simply explaining the uncanny as something mysterious, Freud described it as the peculiar mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, how something different can feel strangely familiar or how something familiar can feel strangely different. He identified