In our technologically advanced society, scientists and engineers are competing to develop a machine that most resembles a human. They have come close to creating devices that mimic human behavior. Replika is an online chat robot that uses artificial intelligence to learn from users and become the users' friend. Movies and TV shows such as Black Mirror and Ex Machina often depicted human-like machines. With these emerging technologies, academics have begun to explore the effect of these human-like machines on humanity. In 1970, Tokyo Institute of Technology robotics professor Masahiro Mori proposed the idea of "the uncanny valley," which states that "a person's response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as…show more content… Christopher Bartneck, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita question the validity of the uncanny valley in "My Robotic Doppelgänger - A critical Look at the Uncanny Valley." Through previous studies, they concluded that humans are able to judge a person "that people often make important judgments within seconds of meeting a person" (Bartneck, Kanda, Ishiguro, Hagita 271). They believed that this period of judgment would apply to robots. They conducted a study that measured likeability of humans and human-like machines. Their study concluded that participants could instantly tell if they were interacting with a machine or human. However, contrary to Mori's uncanny valley hypothesis, there was no significant decrease in likeability between the humans and the machines. They hypothesize that "there really could be no difference between the likability of humans and that of androids" or that "participants might have used different standards to evaluate the likeability of human and the androids" (Bartneck, Kanda, Ishiguro, Hagita 274). These scientists concluded that likeability is a very complex
