The Uncanny Valley [from the Field]

More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay [1] on how he envisioned people's reactions to robots that looked and acted almost like a human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person's response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. Thi...