How the Uncanny Valley Works

The emotional stickiness

of conversational bots raises the question of manipulation. After all, the people making the bots have an incentive to keep people chatting for as long as possible, so they do things to make the bots as addictive as possible.

A few years ago, a user by the name of IlluminatiPirate published Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake on the online forum Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe.1 The theory proposes that the majority of the content with which we engage online is algorithmically generated by bots, all in an effort to control what we believe. I feel obligated to... See more

Corresponding to the price of authenticity, the tech-vex can also exact a price on human dignity. It begs the question, to what extent does machine-mediated living gratify, ennoble? Can it replace the sense of fulfilment that people feel when they attain a skill or achieve an insight? Can a work put together by artificial intelligence match the elo... See more

Moravec’s Paradox is the observation that high-level reasoning (e.g., chess, math) is relatively easy for computers to perform, while simple sensory tasks (e.g., perception, reflexes, mobility) are much harder.

Moravec believed that most people thought this result was the opposite of what most people expected,

It is comparatively easy to make compute

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