The Uncanny Valley

The  Uncanny Valley is such a strange concept to think about. So many people that I know have thought that the idea of humanlike robots is creepy, but I, and I'm sure many others, did not realize that  not only is that feeling a common one, but that it is also a natural human reaction. We, as twenty first century humans, love the idea of advancing technology because it proves that we, as a species, are also advancing with the technology that we create.

You see, the "creepiness" mentioned above is a natural reaction of humans as animals because like other animals, we fear the risk of deception. We do not want to form some sort of misconception of a relationship with an inhuman being, simply because we do not want to later find out that we have formed a relationship with a robot. It's such a strange concept, forming relationships with anything other than an animal of some sort. But how many people in the world today, particularly Millennials in developed countries, have an unhealthy relationship with all of their robotic devices?

In the film Be Right Back, the woman chose to replace her dead husband with a humanoid robot version of him. Honestly, I could not do that. If I could talk to my dead family members somehow, I probably would, but I have to draw the line at a robot. Honestly, I think that one cannot be human without some sort of spiritual being. A soul, if you will. Therefore, no matter how advanced these humanoids become, they CANNOT be human. To me, you could replace a human's whole body, but as long as the soul remains, he or she is still himself. That is, unless we, with our advanced technology and whatnot, could figure out the concept of a soul. If the soul were somehow removed, that's when the human is not a human anymore.

In such a tech savvy society, it is so hard to think of what we should classify as human or not.  In our society, the technology is always competing with our own advancements. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if sometime soon a computer started thinking for itself. It's not far off. Making clones, which would in fact, pretty much be humanoid robots, is not so far off either. All we can do is do the same things that people did when computers were a scary, unfamiliar thing: we must adjust, acclimate, and do our best to not let the technology overtake us.