Last November, Ken Goldberg at UC Berkeley organized a special conference on “The Uncanny Valley Revisited: A Tribute to Masahiro Mori” — hosted by the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Tokyo, and there is fantastic coverage of this event — which includes streaming video of all the presentations — at the IEEE Spectrum website.
“Bukimi-no-Tani“ is Japanese for “Uncanny Valley”. One of many things I learned from this significant resource.
One of those videos features Peter Lunenfeld’s excellent talk (expanding on his thinking from an excellent article called “The Factory Model of Desire”), which along the way raises the interesting question “Is the Uncanny Valley Now a Meme?” The answer to my mind is yes, because it’s an idea that has taken on a life all its own (memes are inherenty uncanny in this way). It’s got me thinking a lot about the circulation of the theory in popular culture, but I will let Prof. Lunenfeld speak for himself:
