Exploring the Uncanny Valley: The Role of Frissonic Systems Within the Context of the Artificial
(or, Malfunctioning Sentience and Artificial Intelligence: How the Uncanny Informs Us of Who We Are)

Garnet Hertz
University of California, Irvine

02 December 2003

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A Proposal for Malfunctioning Sentience

"I am very interested in looking at the relationship between the human mind and the computer-generated intelligence, perception, subjectivity or whatever, partly because there is a lot we can learn about ourselves by looking at how computers fail to do a good job being like us."
David Rokeby, interviewed by Erkki Huhtamo, Alien Intelligence: The Movie (2000), in reference to his project, The Giver of Names (http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/gon.html)

Throughout history, humans have attempted to endow life into the non-living: humankind – through imagined or physical objects – have expressed awe for the creation of life, and have speculated in hybrid variations in this realm throughout time.  Humans have conjectured about the mystery of the creation of life, and have created a fascinating history in the pursuit of creating it.

Hybrid variations in the creation of life continue to be pursued: our contemporary history has added genetically modified organisms, artificial intelligence and artificial life to this narrative.  The age-old story of the human-created living is actively being written.

However, creating sentient, animated life is a complicated affair: the tales of its development are populated with hybrid, malfunctioning beasts and bisections of what it means to be alive, embodied or sentient.

This malfunctioning semi-living hybrid has historically served as a key focal point for defining the boundary lines of life, humanness, and ethics: providing a construction of something most-like-us while simultaneously being most-unlike-us.  The mirror of our attempts to create life are most jarring when the reflected image portrays a unique signature of our human presence, while at the same time being profoundly different than who we think we are.

I propose that contemporary pursuits in artificial life and intelligence continue and enrich our dialogue of the human, and that pursuits in this field should not only be valued for the ways in which these systems behave-like-us, but in the profound ways in which the systems are not-like-us.  In other words, the usefulness of a system can be measured through its simultaneous anthropomorphic malfunction and similarity.  This frissonic effect – a deep emotional undulation between attraction and repulsion – is a valuable existential tool to gain a clearer understanding of what it means to be alive, embodied, cognizant, creative, and human.

The Uncanny Valley, Revisited

"Automata since the sixteenth century have intruiged the public without frightening or intimidating them.  The average person craves "safe" magic, the titillation and tiny ecstacy afforded by the occult kept securely in its cage."
Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, p. 187.

Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist and author from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, provides some clarification in describing the uncanny sense of frisson that is experienced when encountering objects that are most-like-us and simultaneously most-unlike-us.  Although his work was written in the 1970's and was originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to anthropomorphized robotic design, it still provides a useful metaphor toward the analysis of similar creations.

In summary, Mori proposes that the creation of life-like machines goes through a clear pattern of psychological response: as the object becomes more life-like, one's familiarity and comfort with the object increases until a point in which it is perceived as being convincingly life-like.  As the object's life-likeness approaches a close proximity to humanness, one's familiarity and comfort with the object plummets: the object is no longer "safe magic".  It is within a zone termed the "uncanny valley".  Although it appears virtually human, its contrasts to humankind are perceived through its nuanced shortcomings: its embodied deviance, malfunctioning sentience, or glitched humanity makes the object more uncanny and unfamiliar than the "cute" objects that do not attempt to approach literal humanness.

Mori's interests are thrust toward the design of robotic devices, and that increased anthrorealistic design does not consistently cause an increase in one's level of object amiability: similarity does not directly correlate to familiarity.  Applied to the field of robotic prosthetics, for example, Mori argues that the uncanny valley should be avoided by making prosthetics that are clearly designed with a mechanical aesthetic, not a latex facsimile of flesh-and-bones.  By not masquerading as something more lifelike than it is, the hand avoids the uncanny valley and averts the frisson of a cold, spongy handshake given to an individual that was expecting a warm, fleshy grasp.

(Sony)

Multidimensional Mori

"...even though we think we have heard about, or watched the ultimate uncanny movie scene or computer game moment, every possible combination of living flesh hosted by lifeless flesh, dead flesh motile through living non-flesh, dead non-flesh quickened by flesh, etc., etc., an experience of the uncanny in our own day-to-day lives will always be possible.  Psychoanalytic theory claims that as long as we begin as babies in the arms of somebody, we will end up susceptible to uncanny experiences."
Jeanne Randolph, "Looking Back at Cyborgs" p 221 in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

Anthropomorphic uncanniness extends beyond the realm of robotic prosthetics, of course.  The signatures of humanness go beyond external appearance and mobility: cognition, visceral embodiment, creativity, culture and language compose a portion of the palette of our complex and dynamic definition of the human creature and self.  Life-likeness extends into the contemporary regions of research that probe what it means to be intelligent, alive and human.

The fields of artificial life and artificial intelligence are founded on an uncanny, frissonic premise: to understand the formal basis of life or a computational reconstruction of cognition sans-human or without life in its standard format.  Artificial life, for example, is engaged with how life arises from the non-living, the potentials and limits of living systems, and how life relates to mind, machines and culture.  Life itself is the subject of abstraction, being taken from its traditional moorings, reconfigured and re-created in order to understand its primal components.  Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is primarily engaged with the top-down computational re-creation of intelligence within a non-physical software format.  Intelligence, in other words, is dissected from life: intelligence is disembodied and developed as mind-itself.  These new configurations into the exploration of life are uncanny: they take elements of "natural" life and strive to artificially re-create them in synthetic media.

For example, artificial intelligence begs the question: "Where is the body?"  The concept of being able to re-create intelligence without a physical body or brain is a novel point of reflection.  To think that true intelligence can be constructed outside of the neural mappings, complex chemical balances and synapses of the brain is somewhat strange: as if the visceral touch, taste and smell of our world has nothing to do with our core human mind.  The endeavor to create intelligence – a key signature of humanness – in a non-physical format creates the contrast of an embodied tension.  An individual witnessing an artificially intelligent presence is brought into a new relationship with their own body by being presented with the revelation that their flesh may be somewhat obsolete: at least for the purposes of intelligence.

In a similar fashion, artificial life asks the question: "What is alive?"  The concept of being able to re-create life and genuine life-like traits in a synthetic format offers a similar life-oriented embodied tension: if signatures of life can be generated outside of the visceral world, then how do our bodies define us?  Observing what appears and behaves like a living thing in an artificial format jogs our mindset for a moment; being simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the mirrored life in the unfamiliar system creates an existentially frissonic tension stimulates a valuable contemplation and discourse into the formal basis and components of life itself.

Frissonic Value: Cognitive Lysis and Embodied Tension

"...there are some rare experiences, some trivial, some delightful, some revelatory, and some profoundly disturbing, when not a single interpretive template has any accuracy whatsoever... In this state, which I would term "cognitive lysis", in this aperceptual moment, the unreliability of ones' judgement is total.  Cognitive lysis is an experience of being exiled from thought; not drowning in nonsense, but gliding in a stratosphere of un-sense."
Jeanne Randolph, "Looking Back at Cyborgs" p 183, in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

Frissonic tension experienced in reference to an artificially intelligent or artificial life system is a valuable, essential aspect of the design of such a system.  Without a personal existential analysis and cultural context, experiments in artificial manifestations remain as simulations.  The life-likeness of a system is only useful if it offers a point of reflection back toward the individual; back toward the complex environment of society.

Critical and engaged discourse - of course - is an essential beginning to closing the 
existential feedback loop of AI/ALife design.  However, to enhance the frissonic value and resulting reflection on an artificial system, systems themselves should be engineered for the purpose of providing an uncanny reflective point.  The design of systems that are most-like-us and simultaneously most-unlike-us are of core importance to catalyze personal and cultural reflection.  In other words, the goal of development should not be the pursuit of creating genuine signatures of life per se: it should be the pursuit of providing valuable mirrors of contrast into the élan vital of life.

Maximizing Frissonic Value: Spectacular Malfunctions and Reconfigurations

 A. How does life arise from the non-living?
B. What are the potentials and limits of living systems?
C. How is life related to mind, machines and culture?

that are objects that are very life-like yet imperfect invoke an uneasy sense of uncanniness in us.

Visualizing the relationship between 

Furthermore, I will sketch out alternate models for visually representing 

Visualizing 

"Artificial Life"
"the study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural systems. It compliments the traditional biological sciences concerned with the analysis of living organisms by attempting to synthesize life-like behaviors within computers and other artificial media... Whereas biology is largely concerned with the material basis of life, artificial life is concerned with the formal basis of life."
Chris Jangton, Artificial Life, Volume 1, (Redwood City, California, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1987), p. 2.

	be valued for the ways in 

contemporary forrays into creating and rethinking life forms will always be riddled 
Simply put, I propose that malfunction is good.

 

Malfunctions in cognition, language and embodiment are an inevitable byproduct of the human pursuit of creating artificial intelligence, life, and beings.

The somewhat malfunctioning sentience

"So this, perhaps, is the greatest threat of all, the threat that we cannot see a {cyborg} danger even as it stands before us because it is too familiar and, worse yet, we may be unnaturally attracted to it.  Freud fixed on the uncanny because it allowed him to address two increasingly fundamental concepts: the notions of the death drive and the castration complex..."
Bruce Grenville, Curator/Author The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

Masahiro Mori, as described by Jasia Reichardt in Robots: Fact, Fiction and Prediction

Thesis

The uncanny valley, as defined by Mori, is a region to be explored - not avoided - and this exploration in uncanniness creates a valuable frisson, acting as a point of attraction/repulsion that posesses the essence of being most-like-us while simultaneously being the most-unlike-us.  In other words, avoiding the uncanny valley is a mistake because it is the point of greatest contrast to our own identities, while still maintaining the most similar "aliveness".

Furthermore, Mori's uncanny valley concept can be extended to consider the dimensions of cognition/intelligence and embodiment, creating a map for what is a valuable tool for gaining a unique perspective on both the historical narrative of "artificial life" and contemporary research in this area.

Definition of Terms

"The Uncanny Valley": Maharisho Mori

"Frisson" (pronounced as in "free-sown"), noun
1. An almost pleasurable sensation of fright: "A frisson of surprise shot through him."  2. A moment of intense excitement; a shudder: "The story's ending arouses a frisson of terror."
(etym: Old French, fricons "a trembling")
• used by Burnham (Beyond Modern Sculpture, p. 201) to describe the human attraction/repulsion while considering whether it is better to be a race of regulated automata.

"Artificial Life"
"the study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural systems. It compliments the traditional biological sciences concerned with the analysis of living organisms by attempting to synthesize life-like behaviors within computers and other artificial media... Whereas biology is largely concerned with the material basis of life, artificial life is concerned with the formal basis of life."
Chris Jangton, Artificial Life, Volume 1, (Redwood City, California, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1987), p. 2.

Multidimensional Uncannyness: A Proposal for Frissonic Systems

Multidimensional Mori
• Extended into embodiment and cognition/emergence

The Cube of Humanity and Otherness
• You are not me

On the Disembodied Plane
• Increasing Turingness: Stone, Calculator, PC, Cray, Glitchy A.I. System, Turing-passing Software

On the Automata Plane
• Increasing Embodiment: Stone, Doll, Vaucanson Automata

On the Turing Plane
• Increasing Embodiment: Turing-passing Software, Turing-passing "Cog", "Perfect" AI Android

On the Android Plane
• Increasing Turingness: Mannequins, C3PO, "Perfect" AI Android

Looking Down: The Ebb and Flow of Uncanny Valleys
• Patterns, "cuteness", approaching limits and inherent gaps

Vertical Contrasts in Uncanniness: Frissionic Value and Existentialism

Conclusion
Relevant Quotes

The Uncanny in Context

Vaucanson's Canard, which had a moving body, had flapping wings, and could quack, drink, eat and excrete, was an important shift because it "was an attempt to produce more than the outward features of an organism."
Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, p. 199.

"Records show that Vancanson was secretly occupied with a project sponsored by Louis XV: the duplication of a complete man with functioning internal organs, including blood circulation."
Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, p. 200.

The Cube of Humanity and Otherness

"We really don't know if anyone else "understands", "thinks", or even is alive."
Roger C. Schank, Understanding Searle

"I have argued that the particular concrete nature of perceptual awareness, as occurrences in a certain perceptual system, is essential to the references they make to objects, events, or situations in the situational environment."
Thomas Matioulas,  The Primary Source of Intentionality

"No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis, but where the mind is concerned many people are willing to believe in such a miracle because of a deep and abiding dualism: the mind they suppose is a matter of formal processes and is independent of quite specific material causes in the way milk and sugar are not."
John Searle, Minds, Brains and Programs

Vertical Contrasts in Uncanniness: Frissionic Value and Existentialism

"The interesting emergent events that involve artificial life simulations reside not in the simulations themselves, but in the ways that they change the way we think and interact with with world."
Peter Cariani, Emergence and Artificial Life, in Christoper Langton, Charles Taylor, J, Doyne Farmer, and Steen Sasmussen (eds.), Artificial Life II (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesly, 1992) p. 779.

"...one can simulate or synthesize living systems only if one has some idea what life is."
Mark Bedau, , The Scientific and Philosophical Scope of Artificial Life, p. 398, Leonardo 35:4

"Regardless of the ontological states one grants a-life, one is changed and changing as a result of one's encounters with and considerations of it."
Edward A. Shanken, Life as We Know It and/or Life as It Could Be: Epistemology and the Ontology/Ontogeny of Artificial Life p. 386.

"ALife is not just a scientific and engineering enterprise.  It offers a new perspective on the essential nature of many fundamental aspects of reality, such as life, adaptation, and creation."
Mark Bedau, The Scientific and Philosophical Scope of Artificial Life, Leonardo 35:4 (2002)

A. How does life arise from the non-living?
B. What are the potentials and limits of living systems?
C. How is life related to mind, machines and culture?
Mark Beaau (paraphrased) defining the goals of ALife in M.A. Bedau et al, "Open Problems in Artificial Life," Artificial Life 6 (2000) pp. 363-376

"Better understandings of how to explain these {natural} phenomenon will also help resolve a cluster of puzzles about life, such as whether life admits of degrees, how the notion of life applies at different levels in the biological hierarchy and the relationship between the material embodiment of life and the dynamical processes in which those materials participate."
Mark Bedau, p. 398, Leonardo 35:4

Can emergence be defined as "a desire to have novel, unexpected, or unpredictable results spring from a controlled, designed system?"
Mitchell Whitelaw, Leonardo Vol 31 No 5

"...the cyborg is a shifting, ever evolving cipher of our own anxiety and desire to give meaning to the technological ethos."
Bruce Grenville, p 13, in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

"In the genre of science fiction a recurring theme is the invisible line between humans and pseudo-human androids.  A secret delight is attached to guessing if a human actor acting as a mechanical man has not in some unknown way assumed the identity of his role.  We experience a frisson when some author convinces us that we would be better off as a face of regulated automata than remaining chaotic humans."
Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, p. 201.

"...there are some rare experiences, some trivial, some delightful, some revelatory, and some profoundly disturbing, when not a single interpretive template has any accuracy whatsoever... In this state, which I would term "cognitive lysis", in this aperceptual moment, the unreliability of ones' judgement is total.  Cognitive lysis is an experience of being exiled from thought; not drowning in nonsense, but gliding in a stratosphere of un-sense."
Jeanne Randolph, "Looking Back at Cyborgs" p 183, in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

The Uncanny Valley: Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating?

Written and illustrated by Dave Bryant

http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html

The Noh Mask Effect: Culture and View Dependent Facial Expression Perception
Michael J. Lyons et al
http://www.mis.atr.co.jp/~mlyons/pub_pdf/Lyons_ISRE.pdf

or, http://www.nohmask.com/

Bill Tomlinson's "Dead Technology"
http://www.media.mit.edu/~badger/Publications/deadtech.pdf