Callista Gingrich in the Uncanny Valley

Really I shouldn't be so catty, but here goes.

It was Andrew Sullivan who introduced me to the bizarre concept of the Uncanny Valley. The concept is that we empathize and identify with normal, healthy human beings. We have a neutral emotional response to completely non-human machines. As a robot becomes more and more human looking (and acting), we tend more and more to emphathize and identify with it -- until it reaches a point of looking too human, at which point people react with horror and revulsion. Examples given of not-quite-human looking things that repulse include a corpse, a zombie, or a prosthetic hand.

Callista Gingrich

Or, I should add, Callista Gingrich.

So why the revulsion toward things that look almost, but not quite, human? Wikipedia offers several hypotheses. One (presumably favored by sociobiologists) is that your instinct is warning you that this would not be a healthy mate. But then again, Newt apparantly chose to mate with Callista in preference to his perfectly human wife. So that can't be it.

Another (in several forms) is that it reminds us of our mortality and vulnerability. That certainly makes sense why people would be appalled by a corpse -- it reminds us that we will die some day. A prosthetic limb reminds us that we can be severely injured. But I can't imagine any misfortune causing me to look like Callista Gingrich. If you ranked my fears, death would be number one, losing a limb would probably be in the top ten, but looking like Callista Gingrich wouldn't even make the top thousand.

Ah, but then there is "violation of human norms." "[A] robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a passable job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting [or looking] like a normal person." That could explain it. Every time I see Mrs. Gingrich, I can only think that no human being could possibly look like that. She looks like a plastic department store dummy head grafted onto a human body.

Maybe we should add to the Uncanny Valley not only corpse, zombie and prosthetic, but woman wearing way too much makeup. I remember a similar reaction to Tammy Faye Baker.Tammy Faye Baker.