Masahiro Mori

Like, how is it that we see him march back into the pub later on? Those kinds of cues around the uncanny valley, I guess, aspect that this really carries on.

And it's 1970, I think, where, what's the chap's name? Masahiro Mori coins this idea of the uncanny valley, where the copy disturbs most at near perfection, not at a crude approximation.

So the closer you get, obviously, that's where the uncanny valley effect happens.

But the fact that they all sort of file into the pub and then they're absolutely still into the stroke of midday.

Yeah.

In 1970, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology named Masahiro Mori published an essay.

He was observing how humans reacted to different tiers of automation.

Okay.

Utterly, truly, seriously, without a doubt fascinating.

This was first proposed by a Japanese roboticist, the famous Masahiro Mori in 1970 And that concept describes something very, very fascinating.

This is the, the sense of, of unease or, or, or discomfort or, or fear that can arise when something looks almost human but somehow not quite right.

They did this, um, in r- robot technology.

When museum staff formally examined Robert in 2012, they documented traces of pink pigment on his lips and nostrils and faint black brows, nearly all of it faded away by a century of sunlight, which means Robert's expression is actually less defined than it used to be, which brings us to a concept from robotics called the uncanny valley.

In 1970, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed that our affection for human-like figures rises as they get more realistic until...

Just short of fully human.

It crashes into revulsion.