A term or concept · 1979 · AI
The uncanny corridor of companionship
The unsettling quality of a humanlike thing that is not human, and the narrow band where it is most compelling.
Predicts the companion era accurately. Too obviously a machine and it is a tool; too obviously a person and it is a person. The uncanny valley is also the commercial sweet spot, which is a genuinely uncomfortable sentence to write.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
1950 1950-1999 · 1979 1999
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- unverifiedNo specific claim is recorded against this source. The record is a pointer to the work in general; the entry's own prose is the argument and is not sourced line by line.Mori, 1979
COMPANION The assistant you talk to
Connected · 2 out, 5 in
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It sits in