Japanese robot twins fail to bridge the 'uncanny valley'

Human-like robots continue to repulse us despite major technological advances making them more realistic than ever before, writes Olivia Solon.

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro with his 'humanoid' twin.

Last month the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute hosted an extraordinary summit in Nara, Japan. It brought three people together with their robotic doppelgangers, called Geminoids. The inventor of the hyper-realistic humanoids is Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, who along with Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe and an unnamed female model (bizarrely, she can’t be named to “protect her privacy”) enjoyed an unnerving tea party with their synthetic twins.

Nowhere before has the gaping chasm that is the “uncanny valley” been more evident. Coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori, the “uncanny valley” is a hypothesis that states that while we are initially delighted and intrigued by robots as they become more humanlike, when they become very human-like, our response switches to revulsion. If you plotted human emotional response against the robot’s similarity to humans on a graph, the curve would continue steadily upwards until the droid creeps into Dr Frankeinstein territory, then the graph would nosedive into a disturbing chasm before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.