Uncanny Valley in "Be Right Back"

The Uncanny Valley is an area, on the scale of the humanness of a machine or object and the likeability by humans, when a machine or object is so close to real humans that people start to feel uncomfortable around it. As Dr. J explains it, this may be because we are afraid of deception. We know something like R2_D2 or Wall-E would not freak us out because they are more machine-like. However, if we had a conversation with a Geminoid, we would be very uncomfortable because it seems so human yet machine at the same time. The Geminioid does not have all the features of a human being.

In the video,"Be Right Back", the main character's, Martha, interaction with what we call "Ash 2.0" is a great example of the Uncanny Valley. Specifically, how she treated "him" over the course of his "development".  Let's say there are three stages: text, voice, and android. At the text-only stage, everything rather seems fine (other than Martha spending a large amount of time but that is a different issue). She could be well aware that she is talking to a machine yet it does not bother her as much as later on. After all, it is only text? In real life, we get generated text from machines all the time. With how it was shown in the film, there should be no noticeable difference between how the original Ash seemingly texts and how Ash 2.0 texts.  It is basically like texting with a long-distance friend (or partner in this case). If there was a scale of humanness from 0 to 100, this would be around 10-20.

As we got to the voice stage of Ash 2.0's development, things get more complex but little to no problems with 2.0's human-likeness arose. There is one instance when Martha went out to the country with Ash 2.0 on the phone. Martha asked about something and Ash looked it up and got the information in seconds. At first, Martha was unsettled by this but quickly dismissed it. In general, how Martha interacts with Ash 2.0 at this stage is similar to how we interact with each other with smartphones in real life. For example, say if someone went on a long-distance trip to somewhere yet a friend or loved one could not come. They may talk to each other by text, talking on the phone and one sending pictures to the other. The time it took to get the information may be stretching it for Ash but we do what he did in real life with our smartphones and other devices. One may ask about something and the other may decide to look it up. Also to note, I believe that Martha still thinks Ash 2.0 as a machine at this point at least for the most part. One scene came to mind when Martha broke her phone while talking to Ash on it causing her to panic about Ash 2.0's well-being. If she thinks she was talking to a real human when her phone broke, she would not panic over the well-being of the person on the other side of the line. She would know that the other person is ok and probably wondering what just happened. On the scale of humanness, I would say around 40-50.

At the android stage of Ash 2.0's development, is where the Uncanny Valley kicks in. Now, he has a full synthetic body that looks similar to the real Ash. Yet, things start to fall apart. In order to elaborate more, let's compare the behavior of both Ash's. Ash 2.0 is a reflection of the original's online life. However, it only has the online aspects of Ash, not the offline aspects. One example from what I can remember is when Martha and original Ash discussed over his liking of a song with Ash stating he did not to show off a song in order to like it. Another point was the original Ash acts more independent than his android counterpart. He did not need orders to do something. In fact, Martha seems to had difficulties trying to get Ash do something like opening the car door or handling the coffee because he preoccupied with something else. In contrast, Ash is always at "standby".  He does not do anything else than what Martha tells him to do even with minimal human functions like sleeping, breathing or blinking. An example is when Martha wakes up with Ash 2.0 staring blankly at the ceiling. This is what frustrates Martha the fact that someone who looks like Ash is in her presence yet he acts like a machine. This is different from before with the text and voice stages as Martha was dealing with the AI in more abstract ways. On a scale of humanness, this would be 80-90, an area most likely to be Uncanny Valley.

     Ash 2.0

 Original Ash