Richard Collins: Robots, monkeys, reality, and disgust

When too close for comfort, human-robotic simulations become spooky

The Uncanny Valley effect is also observed in monkeys.

Robots may soon be ubiquitous. Avatars won’t just clean the house and operate your dishwasher, they may also become virtual companions advisers and therapists. R2-D2, of Star Wars fame, and Stanley Kubrick’s HAL, provided glimpses of the future.

Creators of human-like robots, however, will have to take account of a strange quirk in human behaviour, the Uncanny Valley Effect, discovered, and named, in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology.