Apr
3
Robot Empire: AI
there's our catastrophe
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Posts tagged robots
Nov
6
Oct
31
Chammak Challo — Akon ft. Hamsika Iyer
tonight I saw a recent Indian release, Ra.One. apparently it’s huge but I didn’t know anything about it going in except that it was a science fiction thing — the dude lip-synching to Akon here, Shahrukh Khan, is actually playing a cyborg in this scene. it’s kind of like an ultimately quite sad rom-com version of terminator two. it was also way too long, but the second half was a lot better than the first half, so it doesn’t particularly drag at the end. overall: positive review, you should watch it, bearing in mind that I’m biased in favour of anything with robots in it. anyway, Chammak Challo is the breakaway pop hit from the soundtrack.
“In a recent study conducted by MacDorman, the uncanny effect seemed to be tied to gender. Subjects were put in the position of doctors, interacting with a hypothetical female patient. Women subjects were sympathetic to the patient’s requests, whether she was represented as a person or as a poorly rendered computer animation. The men sided with the real patient, but not the uncanny, computer-generated one”
from “the truth about the uncanny valley” at popular mechanics
hello! this is super interesting. for reference — in 1970, roboticist masahiro mori posited that realistic robots are creepy because they are not quite real enough to pass for human, not quite fake enough to be easily pegged as fake. that is, they fall into the “uncanny valley”. I am frustrated by a lot of discourse around the uncanny valley — the assumption is generally that of course incongruity/difference/strangeness are repulsive. which has pretty gloomy implications for human society! and especially for those of us with uncanny bodies/behaviours. like, people discussing the uncanny valley will often analogise between the not-quite-right android and the moving corpse and the sick person, and theorise that the uncanny valley response is inherent to our neurology, helping us pick out and avoid sick people or even people outside our social/cultural group. but if different social groups respond differently to the uncanny then that might indicate that it is not inherently repulsive, that we don’t possess a built-in defence mechanism against the Other.
