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ABSTRACT: This essay examines Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori's influential theory of the uncanny valley, which holds that humans are attracted to robots that bear some resemblance to humans, and are repelled by robots that resemble humans too much, experiencing these all-too-human robots as eerie and uncanny. It argues that, in ignoring time and lived experience, the uncanny valley inscribes exclusionary boundaries around the human that are presented as inherent. The essay places Mori's theory into conversation with Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and what it identifies as the novel's ontology of entanglement between human and nonhuman. From this conversation it suggests that rather than wielding Mori's uncanny valley to uncritically replicate and reify our biases about the human, the uncanny valley can be viewed as a site that renders visible these boundaries and normative conceptions so that we might expand our visions of the human beyond them, while examining the histories by which these boundaries emerge.
"My own concern is . . . that the discourses and imaginaries that inspire [robotic visions] will retrench, rather than challenge and hold open for contest, received conceptions of humanness."
-Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations
"[M]y use of 'posthumanism' marks a refusal to take the distinction between 'hu- man' and 'nonhuman' for granted, and to found analyses on this presum- ably fixed and inherent set of categories. Any such hardwiring precludes a genealogical investigation into the practices through which 'humans' and 'nonhumans' are delineated and differentially constituted."
-Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
Introduction
In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori was invited to par- ticipate in a roundtable titled "Robotics and Thought," and to con- tribute to a corresponding issue of the journal Energy.1 The resulting essay, "Bukimi No Tani," was featured in Jasia Reichardt's Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction (1978) under the heading "Human reactions to imitation humans, or Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley." In 2005, Mori's uncanny valley theory received attention at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Robotics and Automa- tion Society International Conference on Humanoid Robots.2 Also in 2005, roboticists Karl MacDorman and Takashi Minato released an English translation of the essay, titled "The Uncanny Valley," which was circulated both within and beyond the robotics commu- nity. Since 2005, Mori's...