Life In The Uncanny Valley

According to students of robotic design and video game graphics, the uncanny valley is the zone between realistic and cartoony, where the robot or graphical image neither looks realistic enough to suspend disbelief or cartoony enough to be "cute" (think, for example, of anime, or superhero cartoons). Much recent animation and marketing falls into this uncanny valley, where an image is realistic enough to be threatening and not realistic enough to be anything other than creepy and strange.

I am somewhat baffled by many marketing decisions that move into this uncanny valley. Who are they trying to sell products to, anyway? The Heineken Draughtkeg (pronounced "draftkeg") commercials show a creepy looking robot-woman pouring beer out of her stomach, which is a giant keg. Perhaps the people marketing this product found that attractive--a sort of robotic electric Barbarella dispensing beer. Maybe it sells better in Europe, but I don't find that commercial attractive at all, in fact, I find it rather disturbing. Another example of this is in the recent Charles Schwab commercials, which have a slightly animated but still highly realistic rendering of various customers talking about the usefulness and attractiveness of Charles Schwab banking in sort of pseudo-interviews while they are going about their normal life. The problem is that the cartoons are neither obviously animated nor are they completely realistic. They are, instead, supsended at the bottom of that uncanny valley, uncomfortably real but not real enough to be human.

As I read an article today about a bank run at a British bank (the Northern Post), where customers withdrew 2 billion pounds (!) from their savings accounts over concerns about sub-prime mortgages and the problems of adjustible-rate mortgages that are developing in England and that have already read to some troubles here in the United States. Reflecting on that scene gave me some pause, as it reminded me of what I read about the beginnings of the Great Depression in the United States. When people lose faith in their institutions, in banks and governments, in stock markets, in their churches, in their families, in their schools, the consequences are serious. Much of how we live depends on trust, and the actions of those who do not trust, by disengaging from what is around us, cause the day of reckoning to come when the flaws of our systems become glaringly obvious and too powerful to ignore. We are watching history take place, and it is real, and yet it feels unreal at the same time.

Life often gives the sense of being in the uncanny valley as well. Some aspects of our existence appear to be almost dreamlike--such that we recognize them as real but also sense them as unreal at the same time. We disconnect from the full reality of it, either because it is positive and we are content to live in the fantasy, or because it is too horrible to deal with and so we must find some way of not letting the fullness of its reality sink in. There is a sense of deja vu, a vague sense of being troubled by contradictory pulls. Perhaps the marketers are on to something in their portrayals of this place. Without realizing the depth of their actions, they are responding to a contradictory feeling of reality and dream (or, for the more pessimistic, nightmare) and seek to profit off of this conundrum, not realizing that it is not an attractive situation, but rather a repulsize one.

Perhaps as well this problem affects us in our relationships with others. At times it appears that we are unable to relate to people if their problems and experiences are too alien to us. It is as if we are caught in that uncanny valley as well--recognizing that we are dealing with humans, fellow children of God, who are like us and have natures like our own, and yet we are unable to understand and relate to how they think and feel and behave, because we are cut off by unbridgeable barriers of experience. And so we are repulsed by others, because they are real and unreal at the same time, as if they were both human and inhuman at the same time. The same sort of paradox existed in the times of slavery (most of human history, in some form) where people were considered human beings (responsible for their actions) and yet property (unfree, without freedom or will, bound to people or to the land) at the same time. Masters (and slaves) were caught in this uncanny valley of combined recognition of reality and repulsion at the other being alien and foreign, and beyond worthiness of human kindness or dignity.

The uncanny valley is an example of what is known as cognitive dissonance, a paradox between two opposite thoughts/feelings/opinions that cannot both be true but both appear to be true. In the case of viewing robotic beer dispensers, this cognitive dissonance leads us to reject the commercial as ugly and repulsize, and to lower our opinion of Heineken. However, if we are dealing with human beings the problem is more severe. We are faced with the need of recognizing both human dignity and human depravity (both our own and others). We are therefore forced to recognize, if we wish to be truthful, that we and others are both created in the image of God and yet fallen beings as well in need of forgiveness, healing, and redemption. Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing to do.