The Creepy Mirror

"The Creepy Mirror – Why we hate robots that look too human" investigates the "Uncanny Valley." Coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, the theory states that as a robot becomes more human-like, our empathy increases—until a certain point. When it becomes almost perfect but slightly off (dead eyes, stiff movement), our feeling plunges into revulsion and horror. Tech writer David Robot explores the evolutionary reasons. Is it a mechanism to avoid corpses? A way to detect disease? The book looks at examples from the movie The Polar Express to modern androids. "The Creepy Mirror" explains the challenge for future design. It argues that to be accepted, technology must either be clearly a machine (like R2-D2) or indistinguishable from a human. Anything in the middle triggers our deepest biological alarms.