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The Truth About Robots and the Uncanny Valley: Analysis

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 11:34 am
by Sabre
Article
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In a recent study conducted by MacDorman, the uncanny effect seemed to be tied to gender. Subjects were put in the position of doctors, interacting with a hypothetical female patient. Women subjects were sympathetic to the patient's requests, whether she was represented as a person or as a poorly rendered computer animation. The men sided with the real patient, but not the uncanny, computer-generated one. What does this prove? That we're still only barely scratching the surface of the brain's social algorithms, which become even more complicated and unpredictable as we interface with technology, whether it has a face or not. Like many researchers studying human–robot interaction, MacDorman is interested less in exploring our revulsion toward robots than he is in the use of robots to dive deeper into the human intellect.
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Pretty interesting article.