The Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley originated as a robotics term. It refers to the "valley" that occurs in a line charting a robot's resemblance to a human being against the emotional response of a real person to that robot. In layman's terms, it's a dead zone in between looking at a machine with no more humanity than a card shuffler or a laser printer and enjoying the company of other humans. On the one end of the mechanism-human spectrum you have a completely machine-like robot, your roomba or predator drone.

Robomotion Peperami-sorting robots at a Unilever plant

As you move further along, you get something like Sony's Asimo, who sort of looks like a miniature astronaut with an opaque visor.

Nice to meet you!

Now we're in the C3PO section, whose human-sounding (though fuzzy) voice, human-like gestures, and exaggerated (or abbreviated) human facial features may even make you smile, a reed-and-fiber airplane mimicking its real-life brothers up above (for more on this, I recommend you read up on "cargo cults". Really fascinating).

A shockingly accurate C3PO, by Mr. Tea. Check it all out at http://www.mr-tea.com/!

And of course, the most human-like resemblance would be a human indistinguishable from a robot: your R. Daneel Olivaws (Isaac Asimov's Robot novels), Battlestar Galactica humanoid cylons, and so forth. These robots appear in almost every way to be human, with personal idiosyncrasies no more bizarre than many human eccentrics.

Sean Young as Rachael in "Blade Runner" (1982)

But just before this lies the Uncanny Valley, the land of horrors. The Uncanny Valley occurs when a robot is almost human, but not quite, and this very closeness to (almost) perfect humanity magnifies the comparably small perceived artificiality to disturbing and truly inhuman proportions. Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick nailed this in their film AI, which, while a bit smarmy and surreal, is, in its heart, truly terrifying.

Only click this link if you want nightmares. OH MY GOD MONICA

This is one of the many ways in which this film makes me howl with horror. David seems human, after all, he's played by the very human Haley Joel Osment. But despite that, many viewers can find that scene, and indeed the whole first part of the movie, rather hard to take. David's peculiar and affected body language could be excused in a precocious but awkward child of his age, but his subtle robotic sheen and the realities of his artificial being really make my skin crawl. For everybody's sake, I have ommitted a scene that occurs later in the movie, in which the gastrically-challenged rascal decides to eat some creamed spinach. Let us concern ourselves no more, except to say it does not go well for anybody.

Of course, once David leaves the home to misadventure across the futurescape with Jude Law's suave love-machine, the human setting is lost, and therewith the extreme discomfort. Seeing a humaniform robot in a mother's bed is disturbing, but seeing one chased by wolf-motorcycles is suspensful and exhilirating. But the first part of that film remains a masterpiece of the fingers-on-an-emotional-chalkboard that is the Uncanny Valley.

Another great example isn't a robot at all, not exactly, but a computerized character. Nobody would mistake The G-Man in Valve's Half-Life 2 for a human being; though revolutionarily detailed for his time, his appearance does fall a bit short in our era of 7th-generation consoles. But it's not his appearance that is most troubling (though it is rather bizarre); it's his voice. Try watching this example:

The G-Man's doesn't have an accent, he has an entire pathology of stilted speech and peculiar stresses. His odd conversational choices don't seem to stem ignorance or playfulness, but rather a confusing and otherworldly quality (and in fact, the G-Man's origins, whether alien are otherwise, are still a matter of debate among Half-Life enthusiasts). Again, though he clearly looks like the 2004 video game approximation of a businesslike human, his unsettling pauses and inconsistent tone of voice make him a rather disturbing character.

I've always been a fan of the Uncanny Valley. Good use of it can take you out of your comfort zone in a much subtler way than abject horror or psychedelic surrealism, and when you encounter it unintentionally it can even be quite entertaining. In search of things just a little different, I've discovered that the Uncanny Valley has some applications well outside robotics and computer graphics. Languages, for example.

Mutually-intelligible languages are languages that are distinct, but so close in grammar and vocabulary that speakers of one can understand the other with little difficulty. As with all things linguistic, mutual intelligibility is a subject of debate, but most agree that Hindi and Urdu, German and Yiddish, Italian and Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verde Creole are all examples of mutually-intelligible languages.

Which brings us to Patois (or Patwa), the language of Jamaica. Patois is based on English, the language of the Jamaican slavemasters during the slave trade, but it was greatly influenced by the slaves' own languages such as Twi and Yoruba, as well as other languages in the colonial sphere:  Arawak from South America and the Carribean, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Scots. It's a language with a unique melody and sound, instantly recognizable throughout the English-speaking world.

Patois' relationship to the Uncanny Valley has interesting religious and social implications. For instance, give a listen to this clip from the BBC:

Native English-speakers like myself might find Patois kind of funny-sounding, and only moreso when written. After all, it sounds like English, and to hear something like the Bible read in it may arouse a sort of thrilling, comical irreverance. We react with surprise and amusement because Patois' proximity to English places it squarely in a linguistic Uncanny Valley, where its structural and lexical similarity magnify the ways in which it's different. But, of course, Patois isn't English. Take a look at this article accompanying that clip.

In it, the author quotes the new translation as reading "De angel go to Mary and say to 'er, me have news we going to make you well 'appy. God really, really, bless you and him a walk with you all de time," which due to its use of English orthography reads less like biblical language and more like something out of Uncle Remus. Well-spelled words are intercut with nonsensical oversimplified grammar, leading a reader to wonder how could this possibly be the word of God.

But of course, as an excerpt in the sidebar notes, the spelling is actually "Di ienjel go tu Mieri an se tu ar se, 'Mieri, mi av nyuuz we a go mek yu wel api. Gad rilli rilli bles yu an im a waak wid yu aal di taim.'" Gone are the silent English letters in "walk" and "time", as well as the counterintuitive double vowel in "really". Reading this phonetic translation becomes less an exercise in understanding what appears to be heavily-accented English and more a window into another language.

The translation of the book of Luke is a controversial issue, with some Jamaicans claiming that Patois is too vulgar to render it and others insisting that it's only right the Bible be rendered into a native Jamaican language. Of course, the New Testament was originally written in Greek, not English, and currently exists in hundreds of languages around the world. One thing is certain: it would be quite a different debate if there were no English translation to compare it to, and no Uncanny Valley between them.

For those who are interested in hearing more of the Book of Luke we just heard from Rev. Courtney Stewart, feel free to listen to this recording of the entire gospel.

And if you find it hard to follow, Bible Gateway has a great archive of biblical translations, English and otherwise.