You’ve hear me opine (briefly) about the Uncanny Valley before.  That place where things look realistic, but it’s not the *right* kind of real and it makes out brains freak out a bit?  You’ve felt the effect, maybe a friend of yours had one of those realistic plush cats curled up on the sofa, or you ran across a street performer playing a very good game of statue.

You’ve seen this video before, it’s the one Boston Dynamics released to introduce their newer, smaller and lighter autonomous quadruped, “Spot”.  And interestingly enough, a whole lot of people on the internet were made uncomfortable when the robot got kicked to show off it’s re-balancing capability.  If you haven’t watched it yet, go ahead.

It makes you feel kind of bad, doesn’t it?  Even though it’s a robot, even though it looks nothing like a dog or a pony or a llama, you’re still just a bit outraged that that engineer would boot it so casually, and on ICE as well!

I’d posit that this critter just walked up out of the Uncanny Valley.  Not with regards to it’s looks, but with regards to the way it moves and reacts to the kick.  Our brains can register that it is scrambling, that those motions are being created ON THE FLY by the limited AI that drives the thing and so, to us, it has become just a little more “real”.

So if a robot that looks nothing like a living creature can still trip the circuits in our brain that say “it’s alive”, maaaaaaybe the Uncanny Valley effect isn’t so much about how a thing LOOKS, but rather about how it MOVES.