Uncanny Valley Explained by Girard's Theory [Turning Point

Abstract

Presents' René Girard's theories of robotics. Sometimes glancing at a robot will provoke an eerie sensation. This does not happen with robots that do not resemble humans at all, e.g., dishwashers or automatic metro; nor would it be the case if one could encounter a robot perfectly indistinguishable from a human being. Mori [1] conjectured the existence of a zone of close, albeit imperfect, resemblance between a robot and a human, which he called the uncanny valley. Robots in the uncanny valley are not human doubles; a small difference is precisely what provokes the feeling of eeriness. The anthropologist René Girard has a special term for this: robots in the uncanny valley belong to the category of monstrous doubles. In the 1960s, Girard developed an interpretative theory that is now widely applied in social science. The theory concerns a broad class of situations ranging from economics to religion, whereby human agents form desires. Desire is a familiar term in philosophy and psychoanalysis; Girard gives it a structural and almost a metaphysical meaning by taking desire as a fundamental building block of social interactions. Contrary to its meaning in common language, Girardian desire is not a psychological affect; its dynamics are not propelled by the binary subject–object relationship.