Also mentioned in the brief was the idea of extremely realistic robot humans. Some examples in the film being West World (1973), Stepford Wives (1975 & 2004) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).
While looking into the idea of simulation humans I came across an interesting theory. It's called 'The Uncanny Valley'. It was theorised by a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori in 1970. (Translated article here) The theory states that the more realistically human a robot or simulation appears to be the more familiarity we have for it. However, there is a certain point where if the humanistic qualities become too ambiguous, we develop a distrust or disgust for the robot instead. This idea is represented nicely in the graph below, and is also where the name 'Uncanny Valley' comes from, because of the extremely steep valley in the graph denoting the drop off point in our emotional relation to the humanoid being.
This idea really interests me, but it might be a little ambitious to theoretically make some sort of human simulation that would cause someone to experience the Uncanny Valley phenomenon because of limited time, materials and skills. But perhaps I could come up with something on a smaller scale that would still relate to this idea instead. I plan to watch the films I have listed at the start of my blog post and perhaps try and find more to draw inspiration from.
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