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Tag Archive for blogging

The Illusion of Life

February 12, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on The Illusion of Life

You’ve hear me opine (briefly) about the Uncanny Valley before.  That place where things look realistic, but it’s not the *right* kind of real and it makes out brains freak out a bit?  You’ve felt the effect, maybe a friend of yours had one of those realistic plush cats curled up on the sofa, or you ran across a street performer playing a very good game of statue.

You’ve seen this video before, it’s the one Boston Dynamics released to introduce their newer, smaller and lighter autonomous quadruped, “Spot”.  And interestingly enough, a whole lot of people on the internet were made uncomfortable when the robot got kicked to show off it’s re-balancing capability.  If you haven’t watched it yet, go ahead.

It makes you feel kind of bad, doesn’t it?  Even though it’s a robot, even though it looks nothing like a dog or a pony or a llama, you’re still just a bit outraged that that engineer would boot it so casually, and on ICE as well!

I’d posit that this critter just walked up out of the Uncanny Valley.  Not with regards to it’s looks, but with regards to the way it moves and reacts to the kick.  Our brains can register that it is scrambling, that those motions are being created ON THE FLY by the limited AI that drives the thing and so, to us, it has become just a little more “real”.

So if a robot that looks nothing like a living creature can still trip the circuits in our brain that say “it’s alive”, maaaaaaybe the Uncanny Valley effect isn’t so much about how a thing LOOKS, but rather about how it MOVES.

 

The Trolls are in the Uncanny Valley

September 16, 2013 People, Uncategorized Comments Off on The Trolls are in the Uncanny Valley

It’s popping up more and more in the common parlance, this idea of the “uncanny valley”.  Right now you think of it as a point where a person/living creature looks real, but something about it gives you the creeps, there is a bit missing that tells you that whatever it is isn’t alive.

I’ve started running across this more and more IRL, not so much in robot-analogues, but in RSS feeds and robo-calls.  You know when you get the recorded message from your credit card company and it *sounds* like a real person, but after a few responses you get shuttled to a real human and you can suddenly tell the difference?  You get it in online chat assistance as well, some of the companies seem to have a low-rent “Alice” style AI asking you questions so you can get directed to the proper individual/department.

And now, recently, I’ve started to run across this in blogs.  I have a couple that I follow on a semi-regular basis.  They deliver a copy of the new blogpost directly to my email whenever it goes up.  Which should be great right?  I never miss a post.

But having it come to your email causes a bit of a disconnect, especially if you are following someone fairly colloquial, who addresses their blogs directly to the members of the audience.  When it shows up in your email, it feels like she/he is speaking directly to YOU, rather than posting to the internet.  It feels…  It feels a bit creepy.  Especially when you pop over to the blog site itself and realize that, whatever response you might have posted, it’s going to be one in several hundred at best.  So that whatever response you might have had, you’re still just a fan with no actual connection to the poster.

I do wonder if this might be where some of the rabid fan hate comes from, this kind of text-based uncanny valley.  With increasingly rare exception, blogs are a monologue.  They are a writer speaking to the void.  Sure, you have some bloggers who make contact in the comments, but not terribly often.  So when you have a fan who feels they have made a one-on one connection, but when they attempt to interact through the comments system, or by tweeting, or FBing or instagramming, or whatever the point of contact is, they get lost in the noise.  They fall into that uncanny valley and so they LASH OUT.  What they felt, because of the medium and the delivery, was a dialog, has turned out to be just writing on a wall.