Eve Herold

Let me put it this way.

If you have a robot and it says to you, I love you, you're beautiful, the same parts of your brain light up when you hear those words as they would if your significant other said them.

Thank you so much.

I'm glad to be here.

And that's because we're wired, we're hardwired to be social creatures.

And we have unconscious responses to anything that looks and sounds and moves and seems almost human or almost alive.

On top of that, we also have a strong tendency to anthropomorphize anything that we interact with.

So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of intrinsic to who we are.

Fascinating and sometimes scary, you know, as you're probably aware of the uncanny valley effect where people become very uncomfortable when robots enter a certain zone, you know, and that that is characterized by hyper realism.

with glitches and problems that crop up so that something seems almost real, almost human without quite passing that last hurdle of perfection.

And then the wires in our brains get crossed and it makes us, it's a disturbing feeling.

It brings up images of things like zombies and undead and other things that have been immortalized in the media.

But it's an uncomfortable feeling and it can put us off from dealing with certain robots.

In fact, studies have been done on this and roboticists are really trying hard to avoid the uncanny valley because they want their social robots to be a consumer item and they want them to be, you know, widely adopted.

So somehow we have to get around that problem.

We want them to be realistic and human-like up to a point, but if they're not absolutely a thousand percent perfect, then they disturb us.

And it's just a strange psychological syndrome that's very common.

Well, let's hope you do.

It's really easy, alarmingly easy for robots to convince us that they have an inner life and that they're actually conscious and alive.

And multiple studies have been done.