The Puzzle of Left-Handedness (6 page)

8

Strange Creatures in the
Uncanny Valley

Nature and culture are as inseparable as Yin and Yang, those two equally indispensable cornerstones of our existence. So how did the left acquire such negative connotations? The answer is fairly obvious. A certain degree of threat inevitably emanates from any kind of magic, because it’s unpredictable and unfathomable, and because its effects are not always pleasant. Perhaps more importantly, people readily attribute unexpected, unwelcome events to acts by higher powers, if only as a way of escaping the question of whether they could have, perhaps ought to have done something to prevent them from happening. It’s tempting to blame a divinity, a spirit or a conspiracy. Modern Westerners are not as likely as they once were to see a witch, goblin or demon behind all their troubles or setbacks, but even today, when faced with disaster, many people sigh that the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Fear of calamity is never far off in matters of sickness and health, or life and death. To most of us, thinking about health means little more than hoping we won’t be struck down by disease. Even our modern, apparently positive attempts to eat well and live healthily have a negative undercurrent, namely the effort to keep sickness, incapacity and death at bay. So there’s nothing strange in the fact that a slightly negative odour accompanies the concept of the left, bound up as it is with health and mortality. Left-handers are naturally affected by that whiff of negativity, which rubs off on them to some small degree, and in any case they’re relatively exceptional. They constitute a minority, and minorities are always a bit suspect. Not dramatically so, perhaps, but still.

Fear and suspicion of minorities of every imaginable kind is so ubiquitous and timeless that it seems innate. Interestingly, there is some substance to this idea. Evidence shows that our suspicion of everything that diverges even slightly from the norm has a solid biological basis.

In the early 1980s computer technology was still very much in its infancy. Nevertheless the hugely ambitious research community in Japan was captivated by the dream of creating an artificial person, indistinguishable from the real thing: the ultimate electronic butler, human in every respect but without human failings. That dream turned out to be a good deal harder to realize than anyone thought at the time, but we can certainly understand how it arose. Generally speaking we feel most comfortable when our non-human companions seem as much like us as possible. Cats, with their large eyes facing forwards and their little snub noses, look much like small human children. Many types of dog have been bred to develop more or less human features, with round eyes in the front of their heads if at all possible and short muzzles. It’s harder for us to warm to cows and pigs, goats and sheep, but they too arouse at least a modicum of tenderness in us. The less an animal resembles a human, the quicker we are to think it troublesome, dirty or creepy. Rats, reptiles, spiders and insects tend not to have particularly good reputations.

The same holds true for non-living companions. Teddy bears and other stuffed animals often look more like human infants than their wild flesh-and-blood equivalents. The prettiest dolls are always the ones with large childlike eyes, preferably the kind that open and close, especially if they can say ‘mummy’. Towards the end of the twentieth century the success of the Tamagotchi ‘computer pet’ proved that people could spontaneously fall in love even with a dull plastic egg that did nothing but clumsily mimic the demanding behaviour of an infant. Apparently we find anything that acts like a human child irresistible, even if it’s fretful and unpleasant.

In the earliest phase of these developments, around 1980, one of the Japanese robot pioneers, a man called Masahiro Mori, struggled with exactly that question: in what ways would a robot have to resemble a human being in order to put us at ease and make us feel positive towards it, and which aspects of the resemblance were less important? He made a remarkable discovery. Contrary to what everyone had assumed, people did not feel increasingly at home with artificial human figures the more they looked like real people. As long as the differences were fairly large that assumption did hold true. We feel more affinity for a robot that has a vaguely human shape – think of classic figures like the tin man in
The Wizard of Oz
or the tub-shaped
R
2
D
2 in the
Star Wars
films – than for the cold, purely functional sort of industrial robot found in car factories. At the other end of the spectrum, we could easily trust a robot that appeared identical to a human, but in between lies an area that has come to be known as the uncanny valley: if things look very much like us, we feel extremely uncomfortable in their presence. We respond with feelings of intense distrust, fear and revulsion, and the effect is considerably reinforced, Mori discovered, if the thing in question starts to move under its own steam.

In 2008 the Japanese robot industry exhibited some examples of what it could do. The world’s media relayed images of lifelike, mostly subservient female figures with supple skin that looked natural when they moved. They were capable of a wide range of realistic facial mimicry, their arms and hands moved the way you’d expect of a friendly employee, and their voices were honey-sweet and convincingly human. Yet something was missing. It was all just a bit too slick, just a little too, well, artificial. Many visitors to the show found themselves involuntarily trembling.

The uncanny valley effect. The horizontal axis indicates the degree of likeness to a real person, while the vertical gives the emotional response evoked.

Mori had discovered something of whose existence we’ve been aware unconsciously for many years. It may explain why foreign actors have been so much in demand in Hollywood as baddies. Men like Max von Sydow and Rutger Hauer made a fortune as a result, and of the 22 super-villains that appeared in James Bond films between 1962 and 2009 only four were born and bred in the United States. Apart from Joseph Wiseman, a Canadian who played the part of the secretive oriental Dr No, all were naturally endowed with thick foreign accents that sounded deliciously scary to Americans: nine Brits, one and a half Frenchmen, two Germans, an Austrian, a Dutchman, an Italian and a Dane. Often they were supplied with an unpleasant wart or other facial disfigurement to make them even more repulsive, or a horrific bloody scar around the left eye like Mads Mikkelsen in
Casino Royale
(2006), emphasizing their status as almost but not quite completely normal people.

In the Princeton experiment, Java macaques had no great difficulty with the non-realistic faces, shown to them in grey with red pupils. Nor were they alarmed by the true-to-life colour photographs on the right. But they responded to the caricatures in the centre, which were also rendered in realistic colours, by quickly looking away as if frightened.

Speaking oddly or having a blotchy, spotty or otherwise unpleasant appearance makes you seem slightly ill. It’s probably this that’s responsible for the uncanny valley phenomenon. We all seem to display an instinctive aversion to fellow creatures who patently have something wrong with them, however slight, whether they are sick individuals you’d do well to avoid or corpses, to which it’s always best to give a wide berth. However obvious this may seem, the precise nature of the phenomenon was for a long time unclear. Was it the product of a biological trait, moulded by evolution? Or was it simply a matter of poorly understood cultural conventions?

In September 2009 researchers at Princeton University at long last produced powerful evidence that the uncanny valley phenomenon is indeed a biologically determined characteristic. They showed that it exists in the Java macaque, an animal often used in laboratory experiments. When the apes were presented with pictures that bore a poor resemblance to other monkeys of the same species they responded with mild interest, and they also coped perfectly happily with good-quality photographs, but when they were shown distorted images of their fellow macaques they looked away nervously. They didn’t like the look of those freaks at all. The experiment ruled out the possibility of a cultural origin for the uncanny valley; in fact, the scientists concluded it must have existed for aeons, since we know the ancestors of human beings and those of the macaque family diverged at least thirty million years ago.

All things considered, it looks very much as if the uncanny valley phenomenon is crucial to the way we determine whether or not a person is ‘one of us’. Creatures that are clearly different from humans have little to fear. We accept them as belonging to a different species. Other animals respond in exactly the same way; nature is a great drama in which everyone tries to ignore everyone else as far as possible. Animals pay attention to other species only if their own interests are at stake. Predators watch out for suitable prey – if they’re hungry, that is, and not otherwise. Ducks quarrel, as do coots, but a coot will rarely bother a duck or vice versa, even though the two species live in close company with each other.

Creatures that look like us and behave the same way, that sound and smell like we do, are members of our own species and therefore ‘one of us’. But that’s not to say we’re all alike. As in George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’. First of all, we distinguish between our own group and the rest. Fellow group members have a right to our support and loyalty, to friendship and assistance where appropriate. All others are theoretically competitors, who must stay outside what we regard as our territory. From an evolutionary point of view our own group is composed of all our direct blood relatives, but in the real world human groups take many forms: family, friends, club members, neighbours, fellow villagers, the sports team, everyone who works for the same company – and so on and so forth, depending on what suits us best.

Sometimes this has sublime, noble consequences, such as when a whole group stands up in support of members who are subject to an external threat. One famous example in the case of the Netherlands comes from the early months of 1941, a bitterly cold winter in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. The first round-ups of Amsterdam Jews led to what soon became known as the February Strike, the most significant act of protest in the Netherlands during the Second World War.

The story goes that shortly before the strike was broken, a slogan appeared on a wall somewhere in the city: ‘Filthy Krauts, keep your filthy hands off our filthy Jews’. If the story is true, then whoever wrote that slogan was displaying, besides a sense of irony, an unusually profound insight into human relationships. It demonstrates how the dis tinc tion between members of the same species can either arouse protective instincts or provoke ruthless exclusion. Dutch Jews were and remained ‘filthy Jews’, but some filthy people were filthier than others. The filthy Krauts, for example.

This is where the existence of the uncanny valley returns to haunt us. It may have a useful effect in encouraging us to keep our distance from odd-looking and therefore possibly dangerous members of the same group, including clearly deranged, seriously ill or dead individuals, but it also creates in us a powerful aversion towards just about every aberration. Crooked noses, unfamiliar skin colours and narrow eyes – conspicuous characteristics have led Westerners to look askance at entire peoples. There is something not quite kosher about those who look that little bit different, or so our uncanny valley instincts warn us. We feel slightly uneasy in the company of people with features that are uncommon within our own group.

Exactly which features these are depends entirely on what’s normal for the group in question. The Chinese find Westerners strange, Westerners are suspicious of black people, who in turn have their own ideas about the Chinese. Redheads stick out from the crowd almost everywhere and as children they can easily fall prey to ridicule and bullying. Dwarfism, bandy legs, baldness, hirsutism, conjoined eyebrows, albinism – you name it, any of these can cause suspicion, as can exotic clothing, strange eating habits or unfamiliar cultural etiquette.