The Uncanny Valley - part one

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I've recently been listening to Chris Barrie's audio book versions of the two Red Dwarf novels 'Infinity welcomes careful drivers' and 'Better than Life'. He does a fantastic job of rendering the different voices of the cast members, and the stories are interesting on Rimmer's personality and his relationship with Lister.

This has inspired me to write a story, which I'm going to post here if that's OK with you. The story is called 'The Uncanny Valley'. This is part one.

Explanation of the title. Wikipedia on The Uncanny Valley.

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness... as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion.'

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the uncanny valley.

(Oh, I forgot to add the usual preambles. The story changes in tone, but this part is PG)
( Read more... )