Since the Hollywood era of stacked cardboard boxes painted silver, robots have been a fixture of both entertainment and the social sciences. They embody questions we still don’t have answers for, about emotions, rights, the nature of the soul, and other things that seem so distinctly human.
Yet, as robots start to become a real possibility, another question – how we’ll communicate with them – seems inevitable. Giving them faces and features to emote may be a step too far.
Face-to-Face
Among humans, face-to-face interaction is in decline. A 2024 article published in the Atlantic concluded that, at some point since the 1970s, Americans “stopped hanging out”, as our “social metabolism” collapsed. Efforts to reverse this trend are underway, with entertainment taking up the baton early.
Live gaming, in which digital casino games have human presenters on webcam, reintroduces some of the social aspects of the physical experience. People who play casino games at Paddy can join game shows such as Treasure Island Live, Crazy Balls Live, etc. in this format.
Ironically, the work-from-home boom encouraged face-to-face meetings, too, via platforms like Zoom and Skype.
We’re still not as concerned with face-to-face communication as we were, though. While it’s easy to blame this shift on social media – the accusation even has a name, social displacement theory – a study published in Time Magazine found there was no correlation between its usage and not wanting to hang out.
Uncanny Valley
Does all this affect how we’ll communicate with robots? Does seeing a face matter? The answer is complicated. Humans are hard-wired to recognise faces everywhere, a phenomenon called pareidolia. This explains things like the Faces of Mars or the ghost at the window in an old photograph.
Worse, at least for robots with faces, is that we have an extreme dislike for things that look human but aren’t. This is the uncanny valley. It’s not some horror movie premise. It likely has something to do with avoiding the dead and diseased in our early history, rather than predatory doppelgängers.
The Builtin website lists robots including Kokoro Dreams Actroid, Alter, from Osaka and Tokyo University, and Engineered Arts Ameca, as real-life robots that fall into the uncanny valley, things whose faces we find frightening.
This doesn’t sound good for our synthetic friends that are trying to look like us, but therein lies the answer.
“Realistic” Faces
Some of the most popular robots in science fiction don’t look human, even when they have “realistic” faces. The obvious example is the yellow-skinned android Data from Star Trek. The fact that he’s played by human actor Brent Spiner might be significant for the more ancient part(s) of our brains. Forbidden Planet (1956) debuted the lovable Robby the Robot, too.
So, overall, while humans aren’t exactly enamoured with communicating face-to-face, we retain an intense desire for our friends to seem just like us – or absolutely not like us at all, rather a stack of cardboard boxes painted silver than a silicon simulacrum.
