This is my favorite subject of all. Actually, this story and the Madden story are repeats, but who cares. This story about the Uncanny Valley strikes at the heart of this class because it's about the intersection of humanity and IT. I just recently saw James Cameron's Avatar for the first time (beautiful fairy tale) and the point about not even trying to make computer generated humans hits home. The aliens in Avatar were utterly convincing. I wonder what it would have looked like if they'd tried to do actual humans. I find myself in agreement with the evolutionary argument about why we're creeped out by characters in the valley - they look not like great animations, but rather like defective humans. I also agree with Clive Thompson who says we'll have crossed the valley when we've got a real person's image created on computer that is indistinguishable from the peron. Check out this article from Wired for more on the Uncanny Valley http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/face_pr.html. Here's a link to the brief article by Masahiro Mori back in 1970 including the graph that illustrates the "Valley" that gives the phenomenon its name: http://www.androidscience.com/theuncannyvalley/proceedings2005/uncannyvalley.html. As a good friend of mine says, "I think the stuff's* cool."
*Not actually quote.
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