The
Japanese Roboticist Masahiro Mori’s Buddhist Inspired Concept of “The Uncanny Valley” (Bukimi no Tani
Genshō, 不気味の谷現象) W.A.
Borody Department of Political Science, Philosophy and
Economics Nipissing University, Canada Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 23 Issue 1 – December 2013 - pgs 31-44
ABSTRACT In 1970, the Japanese roboticist and practicing
Buddhist Masahiro Mori wrote a short essay entitled “On the Uncanny Valley” for
the journal Energy (Enerugi, 7/4, 33–35). Since the publication of this two-page
essay, Mori’s concept of the Uncanny Valley has become part and parcel of the
discourse within the fields of humanoid robotics engineering, the film
industry, culture studies, and philosophy, most notably the philosophy of transhumanism.
In this paper, the concept of the Uncanny Valley is discussed in terms of the
contemporary Japanese cultural milieu relating to humanoid robot technology,
and the on-going roboticization of human culture. For Masahiro Mori, who is
also the author of The Buddha in the
Robot (1981), the same compassion that we ought to offer to all living
beings, and Being itself, we ought to offer to humanoid robots, which are also
dimensions of the Buddha-nature of Compassion. “What is this, Channa?” asked
Siddhartha. “Why does that man lie there so still, allowing these people to
burn him up? It's as if he does not know anything.” “He is dead," replied
Channa. “Dead! Channa, does everyone
die?” “Yes, my dear prince, all
living things must die some day. No one can stop death from coming,” replied
Channa. The prince was so shocked he
did not say anything more. (The
Fear and Terror Sutra (Bhaya-bherava
Sutta) translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu) Masahiro Mori and The
Cultural Dimension of Japanese Robotics In a New York Times article published in
1982, entitled “Japan’s Love Affair with the Robot,” Henry Scott Stokes discusses
some stark contrasts between the degree to which the robotic industry was
developed in Japan in the early 1980s, as opposed to most other countries.
Stokes focuses on the degree to which the Japanese attitude toward the robot radically
differed from the common Western attitude. For example, while “the modern robot
industry had its start in the United States,” Stoke states, “there are 140
robot manufacturers in Japan as compared with 20 in the United States” (Stokes
1982, 24). And as for different
attitudes towards robots, Stokes describes how new industrial robots in Japan were
more often than not first blessed by Shinto priests, after which the employees
burst into applause, welcoming “the new member” of their team.1 Typically,
Stokes says, workers greet the robots at the start of the working day with “Ohayo gozaimasu,” Good Morning! A recent
documentary, Japan: Robot Nation
(2008) depicts the almost seamless relationship between the Japanese and their robot
culture. Jennifer Robertson, a specialist in Japanese robotics, discusses the massive
demographic shift in an aging population in Japan; as a result, she says, Japan
is embracing the idea of a form of multiculturalism that factors in the “social
robot” as an intrinsic aspect of day-to-day life, including robots that can
help bring up the kids, teach, take care of the elderly, and even grocery shop
(Robertson 2010). According to professor Ono Goro of Saitama University in his
popular book Accepting Foreign Workers
Spoils Japan (2008), the Japanese would, in general, prefer a humanoid
robot in their social milieu rather than a human foreigner (Japan: Robot Nation
2008). Professor Goro and many other nationalists of his ilk argue that robots
are better for Japan than immigrants when it comes to solving the evolving demographic
decline in the population. Japan presently has the highest number of industrial
robots per capita in the world and has formally articulated the roboticization
of its culture as a way of maintaining its economic prestige: the government-sanctioned
Innovation 25 Vision Statement of
2007 contains an official plan to implement personal humanoid robots in every
home and school environment by the year 2025 (Government of Japan 2007). There are
differing explanations to account for the uniqueness
of the modern Japanese acceptance of robots and robot culture. Some point to
the Japanese tradition of the imaginative culture of human/nonhuman crossovers in anime, manga and Karakuri Ningyo2
puppet culture, others to what they view as the ritualistic, formalistic, i.e.,
“robotic-like” aspect of traditional Japanese culture. Still others refer to
the legacy of the so-called “Eastern/Asian/Oriental”
embrace of the “Oneness of all things,”
even when it comes to the dichotomy between virtuality/reality. This particular
embrace of Oneness is then opposed to the so-called “Western,” Judeo-Christian Genesis version of humans as separate
from, but ruling over, the rest of creation. Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989), who is considered
the central figure in the development of both anime and manga in Japan after
World War II, expresses this sentiment: Unlike Christian Occidentals, the Japanese don’t make
a distinction between man, the superior creature, and the world about him.
Everything is fused together, and we accept robots easily along with the wide
world about us, the insects, the rocks – it’s all one. We have none of the doubting
attitude toward robots, as pseudohumans, that you find in the West. So here you
find no resistance, just simple quiet acceptance. (Stokes 1982, 6) While this
explanation is convincing on a surface level, it does not mesh with Japan’s
pre-1945 use of technology as an extension of the domination of the sword, as
in the bushido ethic of the samurai,
as Japan’s techno-military prowess demonstrated pre-1945.3 Although
the militarists of the period viewed technological mechanization in a utopian
manner, a wide-spread skepticism of such mechanization pervaded Japanese
society. For example, much pre-War Japanese literature, was concerned with what
Miri Nakamura he has termed the Mechanical
Uncanny: “the literary mode that blurs the line between what is perceived
as natural and what is perceived as artificial” (Nakamura 2002, 365). This Mechanical Uncanny, states Nakamura, led
Japanese intellectuals to bring out the “terror” that can be brought about through
technological mechanization. According to Nakamura, much prewar Japanese
literature attempted to “destabilize” the place of technology in society, in an
attempt to subvert “the ideologies of the machine age”: Machines and technology in prewar Japan, however, did
not simply represent social progress; they also came to be associated with fear
and degeneration. In the words of one scholar, prewar literature depicting
machines was in “a constant flux between a utopian dream of machines on the one
hand and a pessimistic nightmare of them on the other.” (Nakamura 2002, 366):4 The end of WW
II marks a major shift in Japan’s technological development: what can be
described as a shift from the belligerent to the benign. Japan’s present
political constitution was imposed by the Allies following World War II and was
intended to replace Japan’s prewar militaristic and absolute monarchy system. Chapter
Two, Article 9 of Japan’s present constitution (which came into effect in
1947), entitled “The Renunciation of War,” enforces pacifist social values, and
hence, by implication, pacifist technology: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace
based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a
sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of
settling international disputes. To accomplish the aim of the preceding
paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will
never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. (Constitution of Japan 1947) If the Axis
powers had been victorious at the conclusion of WWII, it might have been the
Americans and Soviets who would have been forced to develop more peaceful uses for
robotic technology. As it happened, in both the Soviet Union and the United
States, post-1945, economically belligerent, i.e., military reasons, provided a
driving force in the interest in robotics and technology. By contrast, Japan,
given Article 9 of its constitution, has mainly been motivated by economically peaceful
reasons – an
impulse to make life less menial while at the same time more profitable and pleasurable.
It is in this context that the Buddhist roboticist Masahiro Mori (born 1927) is
such a significant figure in the Japanese robotics and AI community. Mori’s pacifist
approach to technology and robotics best represents the postwar Japanese
thinking about the role of robotic technology in modern society.5 Masahiro Mori: The Uncanny
Valley Although Masahiro
Mori is most well known outside of Japan for his development of the concept of
the Uncanny Valley, he is more importantly recognized in Japan as the founder
of the Jizai Kenkyujo (Mukta Institute, 1970), an influential Buddhist-based,
Japanese think-tank providing corporations and research centres with assistance
regarding roboticization and automation. In this capacity, he has had a direct
influence on the development of some of the more advanced humanoid robots to
have been developed in Japan, such as, for example, Honda’s humanoid robot Asimo.6 He is the author of The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s
Thoughts on Science and Religion (1974). He is also the founder of Robocon,
a world-wide amateur robot contest intended to share and celebrate robot
engineering technology. Formerly an engineering and robotics professor at the Tokyo
Institute of Technology, Masahiro Mori is at present (2013) the Emeritus
President of the Robotics Society of
Japan. In his 1970,
two-page, koan-like article entitled “The Uncanny Valley,” Mori argues that the
more social robots (as opposed to
industrial robots) are designed to appear 100 per cent humanlike, the more they
will appear less human, strange, unlikeable and in some cases horrific, resulting
from some technological glitch in either their appearance or movement, thus
causing a fearful sense of the “uncanny,”
in the way a corpse, or worse yet, a zombie causes a sense of uncanny
strangeness or emotional recoiling. In a peaceful society – a more Article 9
society, and for Mori a more Buddhist-based society – robots and robotically enhanced humans ought
to be experienced as non-threatening. In 1970, on the basis of his concept of
the Uncanny Valley, Masahiro Mori advised his fellow roboticists to design
humanoid robots that act and perform as humans, but do not look and move
exactly like the human, in order that the humanoid robots will be more socially
accepted. Mori based his idea
of the Uncanny Valley on a personal experience: as a roboticist who developed
the engineering for robotic/prosthetic fingers, he felt that even the most
humanlike prosthetic hand available commercially in 1970, which had been
developed in Vienna, still left one with a sense of the uncanny and unfamiliar.
Despite how technologically developed this prosthetic hand was, and how
humanlike it appeared, shaking such a cold, lifeless hand, says Mori, left one
shocked, and horrified to a degree. Hence, in the case of a siliconed humanlike
prosthetic hand, Mori suggests that a wooden hand, modeled on a version of the
hand of the Buddha of Compassion (Mori 2012, 100),7 but with the
same technological precision of the Viennese hand, might more likely be accepted
by the human, with a sense of familiarity rather than aversion. The core of
Being, from a Buddhist perspective, is compassion. Why create new forms of
being that are intrinsically forms of aversion rather than compassion? This is
the Buddhist subtext of Mori’s concept of the Uncanny Valley. Mori begins his
paper with a graph based on the mathematical function y = f(x), an abstract
formula that explains simple cause and effect: the value of y depends on (or is
an effect of) the value of x. For example, stepping on the gas pedal (x)
results in causing the car (y) to move. Normally, this cause-effect
relationship holds in our world. But not all things, Mori observes, fall under
the formula y = f(x). Simple cause and effect is not the way the world works. Although
in our everyday, practical world, y = f(x) is the way things often work, it is not always so: This kind of relation is ubiquitous and easily
understood. In fact, because such monotonically increasing functions cover most
phenomena of everyday life, people may fall under the illusion that they
represent all relations. Also attesting to this false impression is the fact
that many people struggle through life by persistently pushing without
understanding the effectiveness of pulling back. That is why people usually are
puzzled when faced with some phenomenon that this function cannot represent. (Mori
2012, 98) Mori’s own
example is taken from the movement of walking: in climbing a mountain, there
are hills and valleys, with no necessary y = f(x) cause and effect relationship
for getting from point A to B. In the attempt to create 100 per cent humanlike
resemblance in robotic technology, we humans fail. Stuffed animals and puppets
are more accepted by us as fellow travellers than such things as prosthetic
hands that are created to appear 100
per cent humanlike. Such human creations end up in the Uncanny Valley,
alongside the experience of human corpses
and zombies:
(Mori
2012, 99) Mori developed
his concept of the Uncanny Valley after attending Japan’s space-age themed
Expo’ 70 held in Osaka in 1970. Expo ’70 was held at the height of the Cold
War, which was, in a political chessboard of real-time contestation, played out
in the jungle-environment of the Vietnam War, a brutal display of human
ideological violence that claimed the lives of approximately two million
Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, and 60,000 Americans. In the context of
this Cold War mentality, Expo ’70 had as its “alternative” theme the “Progress
and Harmony for Mankind,” à la
Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. This Expo
carried on the tradition of the first international Expo, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of
all Nations, held in London in 1851. The ultra-modern architecture of the
buildings of Japan’s Expo ’70 rivalled in both ingenuity and uniqueness
London’s Crystal Palace. On display
in this Expo were a large moon rock brought back by the Apollo 12 astronauts in
1969; the first IMAX film; the first spherical concert hall; recently developed
mobile phones based on local area networking; the most advanced magnetic
levitation train technology; and a wide variety of prosthetic devices and humanoid
robots. In the after-effects of this exuberantly utopian celebration of the
infinite moral and technological perfectibility of the human being, Masahiro
Mori tossed in a monkey wrench with his two-page publication of “The Uncanny
Valley.” In one off-handed comment Mori states that “creating an artificial
human is itself one of the objectives of robotics” (Mori 2012, 98) (such a
statement would horrify the likes of a Heidegger, Fukuyama or Margaret
Atwood). However, his concept of the Uncanny Valley was a symbolic
counter-thought to some of the more utopian ideals of Expo ’70. It questioned,
however obliquely, the concept of the utopian desire to remanufacture the present human, ad infinitum, but with better technology. While the
concept of the Uncanny Valley has since played a significant role in the
Japanese robotics industry devoted to the development of social robots, it has recently
garnered more interest in the film industry, especially the American film
industry. CGI technology has allowed for more of a cross-over between animation
and realism. However, if an animated character appears too almost-real, such as Tom Hanks in the movie Polar Express (2004), the audience recoils. Animation is not yet at
the point that it can replicate realistically a virtualized human. Hence, because
it fell into what Mori would describe as the Uncanny Valley, Polar Express was a box-office flop,
while the movie Avatar (2009), which
did not depend on complete animated human likeness, was a success (although it
was a poor movie for other reasons relating to its maudlin plot). It is also
clear that the “face” or “avatar” of the IBM supercomputer Watson was developed
with a concept of the Uncanny Valley in mind, when it first appeared in the
quiz show Jeopardy! in February of
2010, in a human-versus-machine contest (Watson came in first place). As Watson had
to appear beside two humans, its “appearance” and “movement” were of critical
importance for its designers. David Ferrucci, Watson Principal Investigator of
IBM Research, describes the approach that was taken in this project to present
a “face” or “avatar” for Watson, which is simply a cluster of ninety IBM Power
750 servers: Lots of thinking went into this. Should it be
humanoid, should it be abstract? In the end, what really made a lot of sense
was to be really clear that this is an IBM creation and what better than “the
smarter planet” logo for communicating that? (Davis 2011)8 The “smarter
planet” logo (Mori’s “still”) was coupled with forty-two coloured threads criss-crossing
the globe (Mori’s “movement”). Although Watson’s engineers gendered it as male
(given its male name and voice), they did not attempt to enter the Uncanny
Valley by associating an exact human-like face or avatar to it. Interestingly,
this idea appears to dominate more recent developments in prosthetics, as is
evidenced by DARPA’s recent mind-controlled, bionic arm-and-hand, which can be
used either with a silicon covering, or without one (UltraTechTalk, 2012), and
Aimee Mullins’ demonstration of her twelve different types of prosthetic legs,
some of which look human-like, and some which do not (Mullins, 2009). In a
recent study carried out at Princeton University, even monkeys appear to have the
sense of an Uncanny Valley when confronted with images of monkeys’ faces that
appear almost close-to-real. Instead
of cooing and smacking their lips when viewing exact representations of other
monkeys, the monkeys almost immediately avert their glances and act frightened
when confronted by the almost close-to-real
images (MacPherson 2009). On the other
hand, while there are roboticists who have heeded Mori’s advice, and created
human-like, social robots that appear more anime-like,
others have attempted to create social robots that are intended to replicate an
exact, 100 per cent human likeness, and there are some who argue that, when it
comes to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, the sense of the so-called Uncanny
Valley soon fades, as it would fade, for example, with more exposure to a
prosthetic hand, such as the Viennese hand. In fact, within minutes, some
roboticists claim, even if a very humanlike robot appears uncanny, the sense of
the uncanny dissolves quickly (Sofge 2010, 2): David Hanson, a roboticist whose company, Hanson
Robotics, specializes in ultra-realistic robotic heads ,
actively seeks out the uncanny. He keeps the motors in his rubber-skinned faces
noisy and overtly robotic, and sometimes presents these lifelike talking heads
mounted on a stick. And for better or worse, even the shock value of Hanson’s
buzzing, decapitated heads doesn’t stick around for long. “In my experience,
people get used to the robots very quickly,” Hanson says. “As in, within
minutes.” (Guizzo 2010, 1) A 2009 empirical
study of Mori’s concept of the Uncanny Valley concludes by claiming that,
contra Mori, humanlike androids that were slightly distinguishable from humans were
not liked less than humans (Bartneck et al. 2009). For these researchers, the
future of “highly realistic androids” bodes well, and therefore, they argue,
the Uncanny Valley hypothesis no longer ought to be used to hold back the
development of such humanoid robots. Pre-Mori European
academic studies of “the uncanny” began in the early twentieth century,
although they have only a slight resemblance to Mori’s concept of the uncanny.
Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” viewed the human
sense of the uncanny in an evolutionary context: fear of the unknown, argues
Jentsch, lies at the core of the consciousness of all living beings, and their very
existence. On this account, fear of the unknown is hard-wired into consciousness
itself – humans
experience this particular fear as the Uncanny, or Unfamiliar (Un-heimliche). While much of what is
considered “uncanny” for the modern human is either a result of primitive
baggage, various forms of intoxication, or mental derangement, claims Jentsch,
a fearful sense of the uncanny/unknown still lies at the epicenter of modern
human consciousness – which is why modern humans so aggressively cultivate the practice of “science”
(Jentsch 1996, 16). Freud’s 1919
essay on “the Uncanny” is written as a response to Jentsch. Although Freud agrees
with Jentsch concerning the innate human fear of the unknown/uncanny, he offers
a psychoanalytic interpretation of this particular fear, claiming it to be the
primitive fear of castration, Kastration
Angst (Freud 2003, 139). Neither
Jentsch’s nor Freud’s view of the Uncanny appears to have influenced Mori’s
concept of the Uncanny Valley. On the other hand, in an interesting manner,
both Jentsch and Freud discuss the uncanny in terms of the Automat robot character Olimpia who appears in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel
The Sandman. Neither Jentsch (1906) nor
Freud (1919) considered the kind of real-time robotic uncanniness that Mori was
confronted with in 1970. As for a more specific
Western influence on Mori’s conception of the Uncanny Valley, Norbert Wiener’s
1948 Cybernetics: Or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine, entranced Mori when it was first
translated into Japanese in 1961. The “Animal in the Machine” that Wiener
predicted shared Mori’s pacifist view of the field of robotics (and Mori’s
later conception of the “Buddha in the Robot”). Although Wiener had developed
his concept of cybernetics during his war efforts during WWII (in designing the
automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns), he became a staunch
pacifist after the war, campaigning against the militarization of science. His
pacificism is already evident in Cybernetics,
which was written shortly after the war: We have contributed to the initiation of a new science
[cybernetics] which, as I have said, embraces technical developments with great
possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it over into the world
that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not
even have the choice of suppressing these new developments. They belong to the
age, and the most any of us can do by suppression is to put the development of
the subject into the hands of the most irresponsible and the most venal of our
engineers. The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the
trend and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts
to those fields, such as physiology and psychology, most remote from war and
exploitation. (Wiener 1948, 38–39) When Mori the
roboticist first conceived of the Uncanny Valley, he was an avid practicing Buddhist.
From a Buddhist point of view, to be fully human requires a radical
rethinking of what it means to be a human in the first place. The given, a
priori, “human” is a being straddled with an unfulfillable desire, tṛṣṇā: the clutching
desire for the permanency of an ego-based
form of self-identity. The praxis and ethics of letting-go of this desire make way for a different sort of human, a trans-human of sorts, a “Buddhist.” Hence, from a Buddhist robotics perspective,
why try to replicate the present human in the first place, the same “human”
that one ought to overcome? In Mori’s essay, “The Uncanny Valley,” the technologically
created Viennese robotic prosthetic hand appears as a metaphor for our
recoiling from what ought to be considered unfamiliar and strange from a
Buddhist perspective: i.e., human nature circumscribed and constituted by tṛṣṇā. If
compassion constitutes the essential nature of Being, and hence the human
being, it follows that humanoid robots ought to reflect this – not uncanny or
unfamiliar, but of the essence of Buddhahood: compassion. Hence, it comes as no
surprise that Mori concludes his essay with a reference to a Buddha of Compassion’s
wooden hand, suggesting that this hand may be less uncanny and unfamiliar to
human beings than a realistic prosthetic. From a Buddhist perspective, the
world of the human is fake enough: there is no need to make it more fake. The Buddha in the Robot “Man will never
reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances.” – Dr. Lee De Forest,
inventor of the Audion tube and a father of radio, 25 Febuary, 1967. In his book, The Buddha in the Robot, written some four
years after “The Uncanny Valley,” Mori does not once mention the concept of the Uncanny Valley, although the Buddhist
subtext of his essay permeates the book. The “healthy person” is no longer
considered to be at the apex of the familiar or the likeable: that apex is
attained with the enlightened insight of Buddhist prajñā (Enlightenment). The world itself is afflicted by
ignorance, claims Mori, “which is seen in Buddhist philosophy as the
fundamental cause of all evil” (Mori 1981, 8). In the 1981 preface to the English
translation of the Buddha in the Robot,
Mori articulates an overly exuberant and naïve view of Buddhism as “the truest,
the most perfect, the most universal, and the most magnanimous of religions”
(Mori 1981, 9). Taoism, Confucianism and Shintoism are surprisingly not
mentioned in this book, although if one were to comprehensively treat the issue
of robots and AI in 1981 in Japan, in terms of “traditional” Japanese culture, one
would no doubt have to treat the contributions of these three other Japanese
traditions. Clearly, as
both a Pure Land and Zen Buddhist, Mori shows a perspective that is characteristic
of modern Japanese Buddhism, which emerged out of its persecution during the
Meiji Era ((明治時代 Meiji-jidai, 1868–1912). During this period, Buddhism was
censured as “a corrupt, decadent, antisocial, parasitic, and superstitious creed,
inimical to Japan’s need for scientific and technological development” (Sharf
1995, 110). However, instead of conceding defeat, Japanese Buddhist leaders
developed what came to be known as New Buddhism (shin bukkyō), which was considered “true” or “pure” Buddhism, and
“which was found to be uncompromisingly empirical and rational, and in full accord with the findings
of modern science” (Sharf 1995, 110). Although Mori himself does not
self-identify his Buddhist persuasion with “New Buddhism,” or with any
particular sect of Japanese Buddhism, in the Buddha in the Robot, the membership of his Mukta Institute held
both Pure Land and Zen Buddhist views (Schodt 1998, 207). Although in no way possessing the
philosophical acumen of the notable Japanese Buddhist philosopher Nishida
Kitarō (1870–1945),
Mori, as a roboticist, not a philosopher, expressed insights with which Kitarō
would no doubt have agreed. They would have agreed that Buddhism’s basic
principle or insight is that all
things in the cosmos are manifestations of the primordial Buddha-nature of Enlightenment,
Compassion, and Nothingness/Emptiness. Hence, Mori, without hesitation, claims
in this book that “robots have the buddha-nature within them – that is, the potential
for attaining buddhahood” (Mori 1981, 13). The
Buddha in the Robot also contains the messianism of Pure Land
(Amitāba-Buddha/Sukhāvatī) Buddhism, as, for example, when Mori
states that his robot’s call is loud and clear: “The more mechanized our
civilization becomes, the more important the Buddha’s teaching will be to us
all” (Mori 1981, 57). In the late 1980s,
Frederik L. Schodt had the opportunity to attend a meeting of Mori’s Mukta Institute. Schodt describes a
typical meeting of this group: As part of this process, Mukta members regularly meet
to recite Buddhist scriptures, meditate, and attempt to consider problems in
new ways. On the wall of the room in which the meetings are held, along with
Buddhist calligraphy, is an elaborate clock with no hands that tells no time;
in the center is a yin-yang shaped table that can be split in half and
reconfigured in a myriad of ways to encourage different methods of
communication. Here the members imagine new robots, cars, and methods of
automation, and, as [member] Matsubara says with a chuckle, “occasionally sip
some sake.” (Schodt 1998, 210) The Buddha in the Robot contains a graph,
not of the Uncanny Valley, but what could be described as the Tṛṣṇā Valley – the valley of desire. For
Mori, the implications of mass social roboticization are not the modern human’s
most pressing issue. This is human suffering, which is ultimately caused by desire: “the cause of all suffering is
rooted in desire.” Mori describes the Buddhist understanding of the process of
desire with the analogy of a bomb (which resonates with the pacifistic
declaration of Article 9): “one burning desire ignites other desires around it,
and the fire spreads as in the bomb. The more we feed desire, the more it
grows, until it becomes an explosive form of insatiability” (Mori, 1981, 55). In
the graph that follows, Mori plots the point at which the modern human being
exists on a scale of “desire.” A “natural” balance exists in nature, he argues: “there exists in nature a desire that knows
satisfaction – a
desire that does not go beyond certain limits. This moderated desire is the
principle that underlies the harmonious workings of nature” (Mori 1981, 56).
The solid line in the graph represents these ‘harmonious workings of nature,”
as a balance between our desires and their appropriate satisfaction (“supply”) (Mori
1981, 56):
In order to
function properly alongside robots, and to welcome humanoid robots in our
social world, argues Mori, we must first learn how to control our own desires,
our own tṛṣṇā for
ultra-existential ego-permanency: we must first learn how to understand and
embrace both compassion (karuṇa)
and nothingness (śūnyatā).
In his Loving the Machine: the Art and
Science of Japanese Robots (2006), Timothy Hornyak responds to the question
as to why humanoid robots are apparently so loved in Japan: “simply because
they are simultaneously science and fiction” (Hornyak 2006, 157). Mori would no
doubt agree, but for Mori, the Buddhist
roboticist, this love results from an insight that humanoid robots are also
part and parcel of the oneness of all
things, of Buddha-nature – of Enlightenment, Compassion and Nothingness/Emptiness. The conference comments In 2005, thirty-five
years after Mori first proposed the concept of the Uncanny Valley, he was
invited to a conference, Views of the
Uncanny Valley: A Humanoids 2005 Workshop, held in Tsukuba, Japan, which addressed
the concept in terms of psychology, sociology, philosophy, neuroscience, and Artificial
Intelligence. He sent a letter to Karl MacDorman, the director of the Android
Center at Indiana University, and the one person who has carried out extensive
empirical studies on the idea of the Uncanny Valley; Mori declined the
invitation, due to prior commitments. In this letter, which has been posted on
the net, he states that “while I introduced the notion of the Uncanny Valley, I
have not examined it closely too[sic]
far” (Mori 2005, 1). Nevertheless, he included two short personal observations
regarding the concept of the Uncanny Valley, both of which are critical of its
original formulation: he is critical of his formulation of both the low point
(a corpse) in the curve of the Uncanny Valley, and the high point (the healthy
person). In his 1970
article, the Uncanny Valley is placed between the experience of a corpse and a
zombie. By 2005, Mori has changed his attitude toward the corpse. The corpse is
no longer an object to be considered “uncanny.” It is now something about which
to rejoice: it no longer has to suffer, which is the fate of all living beings. The essence of human
existence, he states in his first observation, is the fact that humans suffer,
and are therefore troubled, which often shows on their faces. Here, Mori uses a
Buddhist tṛṣṇā
argument to explain why a human corpse should not be viewed as something
uncanny, but as something more real than the living form of human life-consciousness. He cryptically gives a
reason for human suffering, i.e., the very act of decision-making: “if you take
one thing, you will lose the other” (Mori 2005,1). Whenever one makes a
decision about one’s life, in this way or that, one always wonders whether or
not the decision made was the right one. It is as if, with every little
decision, one encounters a death of sorts in the choice that was not made. In
life, one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too: this is the reality of desire.
By contrast, the corpse is free of such desire. Based on a clearer
understanding of his Buddhist principles of oneness and compassion, Mori no
longer appears, in his 2005 observation, to be struck by the significance of
the experience of the uncanny. By way of comparison, Freud, when he was in his
sixties, also had a personal observation about the uncanny in his essay on The Uncanny. He observed that the older he
had become, the less a sense of the uncanny operated as an experiential aspect in
his life (Freud 2003, 124). In his second
reflection in the 2005 letter to Karl MacDorman, Mori addresses the “high point”
of the curve, the healthy person. Upon reflection, he states, Buddhist statues
that bring out the compassionate and healing nature of enlightened-consciousness ought to be held as the ideal of human
existence, not “the healthy human” per se. He states that the faces of the representations of the compassionate
nature of the Buddha “are full of elegance, beyond worries of life, and have an
aura of dignity” (Mori, 2005, 1). Such artistic representations, he claims, should
replace the highest value of “the healthy human” in his 1970 graph. From these two
reflections in 2005, it is clear that Mori is rearticulating his view of both
humanoid robots and artificial intelligence that he articulated in The Buddha in the Robot – that all is one and infused with “buddha-nature.” In 2011, at the age of 84,
Mori acknowledged the existence of the Uncanny Valley, but simply as a design
glitch in the field of humanoid robotics: “To a certain degree, we feel empathy
and attraction to a humanlike object; but one tiny design change, and suddenly
we are full of fear and revulsion” (Kawaguchi 2011, 1).” This, he says, is what
he has described as “the uncanny valley.” Yet, he still articulates the view of
humanoid robots and artificial intelligence found in The Buddha in the Robot, concerning the oneness of all things: I call that its “Buddha nature;” robots, plants,
stones, humans, they’re all the same in that sense, and since they all have a
spirit, we can communicate with them.
For example, when a door hinge makes a sound, it’s crying “Please oil
me!” I converse with chopsticks: “Thank you!” for letting me use them, I
say. They reply, “No problem! This looks
delicious! Enjoy!” (Kawaguchi 2011, 1) Conclusion: Masahiro Mori’s Buddhist-based
transhumanism – human transformation or human transmogrification? Based on the
preceding discussion, one might conclude that, according to Mori’s robotic-engineering-based
Buddhist philosophical perspective, the Uncanny Valley is similar to the Buddhist
concept of impermanence coupled with its concomitant quality, suffering (duḥkha). Like the Buddhist concept
of suffering, the Uncanny Valley can be metamorphosed into something transformative.
Likewise, Gautama Buddha’s experience of sick, elderly and dead humans
originally engendered a sense of horrific uncanniness
in the young princeling, but upon his becoming Enlightened, he viewed such
uncanniness as part and parcel of the fabric of this world, the fabric of “impermanence/nothingness,”
which he approached with compassion. While it appears
to be the case that all things are One, it also appears that all things are not
One, as both Heraclitus and Lao Tzu would commiserate. Human beings appear to live
in the dichotomy of being One with all that exists, while also existing as significantly
separate from this Oneness. Mori clearly obfuscates this dichotomy, which is a
serious philosophical flaw in his thinking when it comes to the existence of humanoid-like
AI and robots, given the significance and dignity of self-identity qua individuality. As well, as a self-proclaimed practicing
Buddhist, Mori appears predisposed to embracing humanoid-like robots and AI on the
basis of his predilection for the anime-like
figure of “the Buddha” as he exists as a phantasmagorical construct in Buddhist
hagiography (such as in the Mahā-Parinibbāna-Sutta)
and in Buddhist iconography. Mori’s openness towards the idea that humans ought
to give up their humanity as “humans”
to the “oneness of all things” in the
guise of robots and AI exhibits the same naiveté
that he displays in his book The Robot in
the Buddha concerning the virtues of Buddhism as “the truest, the most
perfect, the most universal, and the most magnanimous of religions.” Masahiro Mori
can be described as a Buddhist “transhumanist,” and as an advocate of transhumanism.
Hence, he falls within the fuzzy crosshairs of the “Westernist” historian-of-ideas
Francis Fukuyama, who has characterized the philosophy of transhumanism as the
world’s most dangerous idea – one that aims to “deface
humanity” (Fukayama 2004, 43). Whether the Buddhist-based transhumanism
advocated by Masahiro Mori prefigures a utopian human transformation, a
dystopian human transmogrification – or both, or neither – only time will tell. But then, time itself is a relative concept, as
is the concept of nothingness. Notes This article has been translated into Chinese by Shao Ming and was first published in 2012 in the Journal of Yibin University 12 (8) (August): 1-7. Available at: http://goo.gl/rbazjX. (accessed Dec. 10, 2013) 1. The Shinto
consecration of robots faded out in the late 1980s, as an official at Kawasaki
explained: “We have too many to name now” (Geraci 2006, 8). 2. The word “Karakuri”
refers to a mechanical device to tease, trick, or take a person by surprise. It
implies hidden magic, or an element of mystery. In Japanese, “Ningyo” is
written as two separate characters, meaning person and shape. It loosely
translates as “puppet,” but can also be seen in the context of a doll or even
effigy (Law 1997, 18). 3. Interestingly, in light of
Mori’s concept of the Uncanny Valley, WWII was precipitated by the Great
Depression of the 1920s, which is referred to in Japan as the era of the “Dark
Valley” (kurai tanima, 暗い谷間). 4. In this
context, it should be noted that Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was released in Japan in 1929, and Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. was translated into Japanese in
the 1930s. 5. Mori’s
techno-utopianist doppelganger in the West could be viewed as the
roboticist/technophile Ray Kurzweil,
many of whose significant technological activities (e.g., voice
recognition software) have been conducted under the aegis of DARPA (the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency), the scientific wing of the American
military high command. Geraci views the majority of contemporary Japanese
roboticists as just as misled as their utopian American counterparts, since
both groups are heedless of “the potentially disastrous effects of robotic
technology” because of their heady eschatological and soteriological cultural
baggage (whether it be a mix of Shintoism-Confucianism-Buddhism or a form of
Judeo-Christianity): “even though they may be agnostic or even atheistic,
[‘pie-in-the-sky’] religion maintains some power over their work” (Geraci 2006,
11). 6. “I belong to
the Atom generation,” declared Asimo’s prime mover, Toru Takenaka, the chief engineer
at Honda R&D Co. Ltd. “When I was a child, I loved Atom [Boy] and Tetsujin
28 [another cartoon robot], and I used to be immersed in the robot world (Hara
2001, 1).” As a graduate of the Mukta Institute, Soichiro Honda, the founder of
Honda Motors, has developed his company along Mukta Institute principles
(Schodt 1998, 209). 7. Mori does not
describe the wooden hand as typical of a representation of Avalokiteśvara,
the Boddhisattva of Compassion, who also exists in the form of Padmapāni,
the One with a Lotus in His/Her (ardhanārīśvara-rūpa)
Hand, always the left hand. The right hand is often lowered in a compassionate
gesture of giving a blessing (a varada-hasta
as a varada-mudrā). The wooden
hand sculpted along Buddhist principles appearing in the original Japanese
version of the article is just such a hand:
8. Joshua Davis
was the digital artist who created the non-Uncanny-Valley Watson avatar:
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