As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines

As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines

The Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori

More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people’s reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley.