Japanese develop ‘female’ android
Check out the pictures accompanying the article. No mention of the uncanny valley though.
It occured to me while reading this article that different cultures will make androids which act like an average person of that culture. So not only do roboticists have to worry about the uncanny valley, but they have to worry about cross-cultural body language issues. One thing that freaked me out when I went to Kenya is that I was completely unable to read Kenyan body language. I couldn’t figure out who was ‘weird’ and who wasn’t. A ‘Japanese’ robot is likely to act japanese, whereas an american robot is likely to act American. This could affect not only the specific movements that are programmed into a robot to make it seem “normal”, but it could (and probably does) affect the hardware of the robot itself, that is, where do we put these neck ‘muscles’ to make it tilt its head at just the right angle when we’re talking to it? An implication of this is that it may be easier to make a robot act Japanese than Italian, if only because the average citizen in one culture is more expressive than the other.
In the future, when customer service counters are all staffed by robots, this should get interesting. And it raises the question: if the American embassy in Japan decides to replace the person at the front desk with an android, do they use the American or Japanese model?
August 6th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
Somehow when you said “uncanny valley” in association with female androids, I thought of the movie Westworld and what may be the uncanny valley of those particular female androids.