Will we ever learn to love our robot future? With rapid advances in this technology 鈥� sex robots, companion bots and more are said to be around the corner 鈥� it seems a reasonable question to ask, especially given almost every fictional account of that future is still a dark 鈥渦s and them鈥� tale.
With the reboot of sci-fi yarns such as and on television, androids 鈥� the class of robots designed to be utterly human-like 鈥� are once again capturing our imaginations.
It was in 1970 that professor Masahiro Mori from the Tokyo Institute of Technology predicted that as we try to make robots more human, we would reach a point where we were disturbed and repulsed by them as they became almost, but not quite, human.
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He labelled this effect the 鈥�uncanny valley鈥� 鈥� hypothesising that when technology improved and robots became truly human-like, then we would once again feel comfortable with them. The robots in Westworld look just like us. They鈥檝e crossed the valley (of course they have, these are actors).
According to Mori鈥檚 work, , we should be unthreatened. But in these fictions, and many others, they are still portrayed as utterly other and treated as such. For example, in sex robot scenes 鈥� surely an ultimate test of human-robot relations 鈥撀�Westworld guests use that otherness as an excuse to unleash their worst natures.
Digital distrust
In reality we have a relationship with technology that few of us can avoid. Unknowingly or not, we bond with digital products. Think of smartphones 鈥� we are fiercely protective of them; they are too intimate for us to hand over to just anyone to use.
Why then, when our children are born digital natives and we spend our days using technology, do we still endlessly portray lifelike robots as a step too far?
The answer may lie in our perception of control. While we already embrace AI through apps such as Siri, we have the sense that we are in charge; that they are inanimate and under our command. Not so androids.
A wealth of stories spanning millennia have warned us of the dangers of human-like machines, from Talos the Cretan bronze giant attacking the Argonauts, to James Cameron鈥檚 Terminator.
We fear the dystopian potential 鈥� and we aren鈥檛 always wrong to do so. The singularity might not be upon us yet, but there are machines on the battlefield and drones in the air that already threaten lives.
We鈥檝e long been warned about artificial life, a trope that seeps into our everyday existence. Take a tendency to distrust disruptive technology and mix it with the potential for autonomous artificial intelligence in human form, and it鈥檚 no wonder we still prefer to make war, not love, with the robots.
