Seeming autonomy, technology and the uncanny valley
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Seeming autonomy, technology and the uncanny valley Rasmus Gahrn‑Andersen1 Received: 5 November 2019 / Accepted: 6 July 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper extends Mori’s (IEEE Robot Autom Mag 19:98–100, 2012) uncanny valley-hypothesis to include technologies that fail its basic criterion that uncanniness arises when the subject experiences a discrepancy in a machine’s human likeness. In so doing, the paper considers Mori’s hypothesis about the uncanny valley as an instance of what Heidegger calls the ‘challenging revealing’ nature of modern technology. It introduces seeming autonomy and heteronomy as phenomenological categories that ground human being-in-the-world including our experience of things and people. It is suggested that this categorical distinction is more foundational than Heidegger’s existential structures and phenomenological categories. Having introduced this novel phenomenological distinction, the paper considers the limits of Mori’s hypothesis by drawing on an example from science fiction that showcases that uncanniness need not only be caused by machines that resemble human beings. In so doing, it explores how the seeming autonomy-heteronomy distinction clarifies (at least some of) the uncanniness that can arise when humans encounter advanced technology which is irreducible to the anthropocentrism that shapes Mori’s original hypothesis. Keywords Machines and robots · Uncanny valley · Heideggerian phenomenology · Autonomy and heteronomy
1 Introduction Roboticists tend to explore human–robot relations by focusing on the functional traits of the latter and, more specifically, the robot as an autonomous system (see, for instance, Breazeal 2003; Ziemke 2008; Huang and Bilge 2016). In so doing, they adopt a 3rd person view, or a naturalistic perspective, by considering the objective properties of robots as the enabling conditions for their successful encounters with humans. This paper takes a different approach by emphasizing how human engagements with technology always involve a pre-reflective experiential component. I explore how tacit phenomenological categories enable human interaction with robots and machines more generally and how technological entities are relationally constituted through the ways in which we engage with them. Specifically, I argue that the functionality of machines depends on how they appear to— and are experienced by—human subjects as they are put to * Rasmus Gahrn‑Andersen [email protected] 1
Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Sdr. Stationsvej 28, 4200 Slagelse, Denmark
use. Consequently, the paper turns from autonomy in the naturalistic sense to seeming autonomy—or, autonomy in the phenomenological sense. The idea that human phenomenology plays a foundational role in human–machine interactions is not new. It can be traced back to Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley-hypothesis which is highly influential in the field of social robotics.1 Mori, a Japanese roboticist, introduc
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