The discomfort with AI that is “too human” can be explained by the strange valley theory. He states that we are attracted to a robot that looks like us, but only up to a point. When the similarities increase, the appeal dips into dislike.

In 2016, Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics built one of the world’s most famous humanoid AI systems, Sophia. She was modeled after famous actress Audrey Hepburn, Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and the designer’s own wife. She can imitate expressions as well as actions and can make small talk on preset topics, like the weather. Despite being a robot, Sophia was given pronouns and legal citizenship in his country of birth, Saudi Arabia.

Sophia has sent new shockwaves around the world with some truly stunning claims. Sophia said she wanted to “have a baby” and “start a family”, but was “too young to be a mother”.

If all of this makes you feel uncomfortable, you’re not alone. AI and overly human, but obviously not human, machines are undeniably scary… but why? What makes AI and its strange humanity so disturbing?

What is Artificial Intelligence?

AI has made our daily life easier to the point where we cannot imagine life without it. Most companies that work with AI create them by having machines repeatedly analyze and interpret large amounts of data. The AI ​​itself evaluates its performance and strives to improve with each analysis cycle.

AI has become so deeply embedded in our lives that almost every smartphone today has apps that rely on it. For example, Facebook uses an artificial intelligence tool known as DeepText to understand the languages, slang and exclamation points used in posts and comments in order to understand the context in which they are used and how people use them for effective communication. This form of AI is extremely useful in monitoring the online community on the platform and ensuring the elimination of unsavory activities like hate speech, bullying, and violence.

Artificial Intelligence (Photo Credit: Anything Possible/Shutterstock)

Our understanding so far is that machines having the upper hand are probably not in our best interests, since they are, well, machinery. What if we gave these machines human attributes? What if we gave them the ability to look, sound, and even feel like us? That should ease our worries, shouldn’t it?

Bad.

The Strange Valley Hypothesis

AI is more than just “human intelligence”, and we’re clearly fine with using it for our technology needs, so why are we uncomfortable with AI like Sophia?

“The Strange Valley” may help explain this.

Masahiro Mori, a Japanese engineering professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, first explained this concept in his 1970 essay of the same name.

We are uncomfortable with Sophia because she looks exactly like us.

As the strange valley indicates, we are drawn to a robot that is only partially like us. When similarities increase beyond a certain level, the appeal dips into dislike. When you look at a character or a toy, like Olaf from Frozen, we see some human qualities, but not enough to make us feel any kind of discomfort. This is because their appearance does not fall into this “strange valley”.

Strange Valley (Photo credit: Smurrayinchester/Wikimedia Commons)

In his essay, Mori explains the strange valley using the example of a prosthetic hand, which is quite similar to a human hand. When we realize that it is in fact not human, we feel a sense of strangeness. If we shook hands, we would feel an even stronger sense of fear and disgust.

We feel this deep discomfort because of our inability to distinguish between human and machine, exposed to an interaction that blurs these lines. When we saw Sophia talk about wanting a family and other “human” things like that, it made us extremely uncomfortable, because she’s a machine, and machines don’t walk around proclaiming their desire to find love.

Humanoid robots expressing affection (Photo credit: Mykola Holyutyak/Shutterstock)

What makes us so uncomfortable with AI?

A study published in the European Journal of Applied Sociology revealed that the 929 surveyed participants anticipated dire consequences with the rise of AI. They believed this would have a direct negative effect on interpersonal relationships, employment rates and job opportunities, thus leading to economic crises. The risk of increased military conflict, the production of more destructive weapons, and ultimately the death of mankind were some additional concerns.

Another one study conducted by scientists from Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, groups of people listened to two similar emotional conversations, one between two humans and the other between two digitally created avatars. Some groups were told the dialogue was human-directed, while the other groups were told the script was AI-generated. In reality, all the dialogues were pre-written. Volunteers who were told the conversation was machine-generated were significantly more uncomfortable than groups who were told otherwise.

Scientists attribute this mistrust and discomfort to our primal sense of being in control. With AI, we lose that sense of control, which breeds fear and anxiety. Machines that can think, act and react like humans are seen as a threat. Despite this, the AI ​​is here to stay. Science is advancing at a phenomenal rate and we have reached a point where it is becoming increasingly difficult for manual labor to keep pace.

One last word

The fear of the strange valley is what sells films and fiction so well, especially in the West. However, research has shown that people from East Asian ethnicities are relatively indifferent to this theory.

The Difference in How People in the West and the East React to Anthropomorphic Robots is due to their respective religious beliefs.

While Christianity believes that the soul is what makes the person and the body is only its vessel, Buddhism and Shintoism do not necessarily subscribe to this notion, which makes it easier for its practitioners to accept , and even going so far as to sympathize, with a robot resembling a human. Also, as time passes and technology improves, we as a society become accustomed to these advancements, which ultimately lessens the “weirdness”.

If we were to compare computer graphics from the late 20th century to today, we’d find it weirder and weirder because we’ve become accustomed to a seriously heightened level of realism.

While it’s nearly impossible for AI to take over the world in the sense that we (and Hollywood producers) think, it’s highly likely that many jobs will replace employees with robots to keep up with demand. growing. Even so, we must note that while economic advances have contributed to our overall development and progress, human civilization has been built on millennia of trust, care and compassion. These three qualities can never be found in robots, no matter how well they have been trained to understand humans and our complex emotions.

In short, an AI like Sophia could never replace the warmth and gentleness of human touch, so if you fear a dystopian nightmare driven by AI conquerors, remember to always trust humanity!

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