“[Masahiro] Mori envisioned a time when robots would become so sophisticated that they would look almost like humans. But that ‘almost’ was a problem. Whatever else those future bots might prove to be, he said, one thing was certain: They would strike us as monstrous. Mori created a chart describing how our degree of identification and empathy with inanimate objects increases as their appearance approaches our own–we relate more to stuffed animals, for instance, than to industrial robots. But at a certain level of near-humanness, our affinity falls off a cliff. Mori dubbed this the uncanny valley.”
–Lisa Katayama. “The Godfather.” Wired 19.12 (Dec. 2011): 66.