The idea of the uncanny valley was originally proposed by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, in 1970. Though he had no hard data, his intuition was that increasing humanness in a robot was positive only up to a certain point. Dr Mori drew a graph (see chart) with “human-likeness” on the horizontal axis and a quality he called shinwakan (variously translated as “familiarity” and “comfort level”) on the vertical one. As an object or image looks and behaves more like a human, the viewer’s level of shinwakan increases. Beyond a certain point, however, the not-quite-human object strikes people as creepy, and shinwakan drops. This is the uncanny valley. Only when the object becomes almost indistinguishable from a human does shinwakan increase again.
However, so far few drivers are buying it. October, before the festival of Diwali, is reckoned to be an auspicious time to get a family motor, and last month car sales in India rose by 38% compared with a year earlier. But only 3,065 Nanos were sold, a paltry 2% rise on the year before (and well down on September), with cumulative sales for the year reaching just 40,467.
What is more, Mr Assange seems unwilling to reflect on the risks of what he is doing. Amnesty International has complained that documents in WikiLeaks' release on Afghanistan were not sufficiently edited, and thus likely to endanger Afghans who had worked for the coalition. Even such supporters as Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic member of parliament, has expressed disappointment over how the documents were released. Mr Assange disagrees, saying that nobody needed protection as a result of the release-citing, of all sources, NATO in kabul. In contrast, Mr Ellsberg is more self-critical and concedes, for instance, that the publication of the Pentagon Papers actually had no effect on the war in Vietnam.