Wednesday 14 September 2016

beyond the uncanny valley of the dolls

The eerily realistic school girl called Saya is the creation of design duo Teruyuki and Yuki Ishikawa, and although fully virtual and computer-generated does seem to cross over from the uncanny and surpasses hyper-realism to something indistinguishable from an authentic human being. I wonder what that achievement might mean in terms of the Turing test for this level of human-machine interface and whether we want to be comfortable with that. What do you think? Should artificial beings be made to wear some emblem or badge to mark them as such, like the hologram Rimmer on Red Dwarf who was marked with an H on his forehead?