Uncanny Valley

Humanity vs. Technology (in 5 minutes)

July 31, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Aesthetics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Biotech, Blog2024+, critical thinking, Democracy, Digital Humanities, Emergent Tech, Ethics, Internet, Justice, Labor Issues, Machine Learning, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Posthuman, Public Philosophy, Social Media, Surveillance, Teaching, Technology, Technology and Human Values, Uncanny Valley 0 Comments

Dr. Leigh M. Johnson summarizes the challenges technology poses to humanity (and the humanities) in 5-minute PowerPoint.

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Someone Like You: On Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Black Mirror, Ethics, Film, Film Reviews, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values, Television, Uncanny Valley 0 Comments

[NOTE: This is the next installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] Back in 2013, when the second season of Black Mirror was released, I was only just beginning to expand what was, at the time, a somewhat niche-market interest in the tech phenomenon…

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Uncanny Vulnerability: On the Creepiness of “Hi, Stranger”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values, Uncanny Valley 0 Comments

In the last couple of weeks, Kirsten Lepore’s brilliant claymation short “Hi, Stranger” has taken the internet by storm.  It features a nameless, gelatinous, nude, humanoid protagonist (pictured left) with a soothing, gender-ambiguous voice who engages in a spontaneous, quasi-therapeutic, and strangely intimate conversation directly with you, the viewer. Reactions to Lepore’s short have been…

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The Uncanny Valley 8: Pet Robots

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley, Weak Humanism 1 Comment

[This is a continuation of my (now numerous) reflections on the Uncanny Valley. You can read the previous seven installments here if you’re interested.] Late last semester, as a part of my department’s semi-regular Philosophy Film Series, we screened Mechanical Love, a 2007 documentary about the ever-evolving relationships between humans and robots. The film focuses…

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The Uncanny Valley 7: Sonzai-Kan

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 4 Comments

Every time I try to put away my obsession with the uncanny valley, some new robot or robot-story invades my world and reanimates that fascination all over again. Regular readers of this blog will know that I first became interested in robotocist Masahiro Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley back in October of 2010, when…

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The Uncanny Valley 6: Unreal and Unreal-er, or, Why a “Fake” Fake Isn’t Uncanny

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 2 Comments

I made a brief mention in my last uncanny valley post about the difference between “real” music, by which I mean music played on actual (i.e. “real,” material or physical) musical instruments by musicians (i.e. human beings with some skill on those instruments, availing themselves of said instruments without superadded technological assistance) on the one…

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The Uncanny Valley 5: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 4 Comments

Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve written several posts about the “uncanny valley” on this blog. The theory of the uncanny valley is loosely based on Freud’s account of Das Unheimliche (the “uncanny”), a major trope of psychoanalytic theory and a favorite play-thing of literary, film and cultural theorists who borrow…

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The Uncanny Valley 4: Magic, Miracles, and the Necessary Third

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 3 Comments

As many of you know, I was a tad bit obsessed with a certain theory in robotics known as “the uncanny valley” several months back. I even delivered a philosophy paper this past Spring using the uncanny valley as one way of explaining our aversion to racial passing. (You can read my series of posts…

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The Uncanny Valley

June 9, 2024 Dr. J Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Uncanny Valley, Weak Humanism 3 Comments

[Update: This post is the first in an ongoing series about the Uncanny Valley.  Click here to read them all.] A couple of weeks ago when I was teaching Descartes’ Meditations, one of my students made reference to something called the “uncanny valley,” which I had never heard of before but which sounded really fascinating….

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The Uncanny Valley 2: Racial Appearances

June 9, 2024 Dr. J Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Uncanny Valley, Weak Humanism 5 Comments

[This is a continutation of my previous post on the uncanny valley. If you don’t know what the uncanny valley is, you may want to go back and read the previous post first.] In 1931, at the beginning of the dénouement of the Harlem Renaissance, conservative (some would say “reactionary”) African-American author George Schuyler penned…

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