Uncanny robot head

A grad student breaks a design taboo, and builds robots heads which look and act like humans'. We're entering the old terrain of Capek, Kleist, Twilight Zone, Ligotti, and Phil Dick, manikins and puppets, where androids uncannily give back to us our humanity, both more and less alienated:

No one asks why, of all the roboticists in the world, only Hanson appears to be attempting to build a robotic head that is indistinguishable in form and function from a human. No one points out that he is violating a decades-old taboo among robot designers. And no one asks him how he's going to do it—how he plans to cross to the other side of the Uncanny Valley.

Think of the subgenre of ventriloquist doll horror stories. Remember the doll under the bed. At bed, the head of John the Baptist. Now read Kleist's apocalyptic conclusion to his amazing puppet essay:

"...We see how, in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. – But just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of a point, reappear on the other after their passage through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god."

"That means," said I, somewhat amused, "that we would have to eat of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of innocence."

"Of course," he answered, "and that is the final chapter in the history of the world."

(via Jesse Walker)

Comments

[J. James Bono]

That is one creepy image, I can understand the taboo. I am equally creeped out by systems such as Stelarc's Prosthetic Head. However, outside of the general creepy-crawliness of such an endeavor, I have to think about the educational value of such a creation. As an interface it could prove extremely useful. Justine Cassel's piece in AI Magazine (22.4, Winter 2001, pp 67-84) entitled, “Embodied Conversational Agents: Representation and Intelligence in User Interfaces” provides some useful perspectives on the issue.