The Uncanny Valley was on this week’s episode of 30 Rock:
What’s the uncanny valley?
…a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.
Which is a reason why so many urban and city simulations are unconvincing, no matter how interesting digital urban experiments are at recreating urbanity. The life of urban life is often busy.
