Free The Puzzle of Left-Handedness by Rik Smits

eyes, preferably the kind that open and close, especially if they can say ‘mummy’. Towards the end of the twentieth century the success of the Tamagotchi ‘computer pet’ proved that people could spontaneously fall in love even with a dull plastic egg that did nothing but clumsily mimic the demanding behaviour of an infant. Apparently we find anything that acts like a human child irresistible, even if it’s fretful and unpleasant.
    In the earliest phase of these developments, around 1980, one of the Japanese robot pioneers, a man called Masahiro Mori, struggled with exactly that question: in what ways would a robot have to resemble a human being in order to put us at ease and make us feel positive towards it, and which aspects of the resemblance were less important? He made a remarkable discovery. Contrary to what everyone had assumed, people did not feel increasingly at home with artificial human figures the more they looked like real people. As long as the differences were fairly large that assumption did hold true. We feel more affinity for a robot that has a vaguely human shape – think of classic figures like the tin man in The Wizard of Oz or the tub-shaped R 2 D 2 in the Star Wars films – than for the cold, purely functional sort of industrial robot found in car factories. At the other end of the spectrum, we could easily trust a robot that appeared identical to a human, but in between lies an area that has come to be known as the uncanny valley: if things look very much like us, we feel extremely uncomfortable in their presence. We respond with feelings of intense distrust, fear and revulsion, and the effect is considerably reinforced, Mori discovered, if the thing in question starts to move under its own steam.
    In 2008 the Japanese robot industry exhibited some examples of what it could do. The world’s media relayed images of lifelike, mostly subservient female figures with supple skin that looked natural when they moved. They were capable of a wide range of realistic facial mimicry, their arms and hands moved the way you’d expect of a friendly employee, and their voices were honey-sweet and convincingly human. Yet something was missing. It was all just a bit too slick, just a little too, well, artificial. Many visitors to the show found themselves involuntarily trembling.
 
The uncanny valley effect. The horizontal axis indicates the degree of likeness to a real person, while the vertical gives the emotional response evoked. 
    Mori had discovered something of whose existence we’ve been aware unconsciously for many years. It may explain why foreign actors have been so much in demand in Hollywood as baddies. Men like Max von Sydow and Rutger Hauer made a fortune as a result, and of the 22 super-villains that appeared in James Bond films between 1962 and 2009 only four were born and bred in the United States. Apart from Joseph Wiseman, a Canadian who played the part of the secretive oriental Dr No, all were naturally endowed with thick foreign accents that sounded deliciously scary to Americans: nine Brits, one and a half Frenchmen, two Germans, an Austrian, a Dutchman, an Italian and a Dane. Often they were supplied with an unpleasant wart or other facial disfigurement to make them even more repulsive, or a horrific bloody scar around the left eye like Mads Mikkelsen in Casino Royale (2006), emphasizing their status as almost but not quite completely normal people.

    In the Princeton experiment, Java macaques had no great difficulty with the non-realistic faces, shown to them in grey with red pupils. Nor were they alarmed by the true-to-life colour photographs on the right. But they responded to the caricatures in the centre, which were also rendered in realistic colours, by quickly looking away as if frightened.
    Speaking oddly or having a blotchy, spotty or otherwise unpleasant appearance makes you seem slightly ill. It’s probably this that’s responsible for the uncanny valley phenomenon. We