Digital Reflections: Our Uncanny Valley
As artificial intelligence weaves itself into the tapestry of society, an uncanny1 disquiet amongst the rank and file grows beneath elite pronouncements of progress. In reality machines don't disturb us so much as their reflection of our own artificiality. Each artificial advance refracts our current fragile constructed unreality.
Each day millions of citizens genuflect before social media's altar, including yours truly, offering up our manufactured selves. Thumbs glide past countless faces, each "moment" sanitized and polished for maximum engagement. While railing against AI's synthetic interactions we reduce our own existence to binary choices: like/ignore, share/scroll, connect/disconnect, a pavlovian loop of decreasing returns.
Like Pygmalion we are turning ourselves into statues while giving life to our digital representations. We've carved our online avatars with pathological precision, animated them, crafted them more pristine than flesh could sustain. Now our creations move independently, and we shudder—not at their artificiality, but at how cheaply we've sold our organic selves.
Cable news networks pulse with performative rage, their anchors acting out prefabricated roles in an endless theatre of manufactured crisis. They warn of AI's dire threats to truth while dealing in crafted narratives and strategic omissions.
Graphics swirl, voices rise and fall in practiced cadence, emotions are calibrated for maximum viewer retention. The medium perfected emotional manipulation long before any AI model entered the scene. Which January 6th is real, which artificial, the one in 2021 or the one coming up in 2025?
The political arena lays bare our deepest hypocrisies. MAGA faithful denounce AI while consuming human-constructed conspiracy theories. The same leaders who built our echo chambers now push the pause button on legislation that might mitigate AI's dangers to democracy. With our tweets and our blocks we weaponized technology against one other long before we feared it might weaponize itself. The machines didn't create our tribal warfare. They simply accelerated our rush toward voluntary delusion.
Look closely at these fears of artificial intelligence. They speak not of future threats but present losses, of connections atrophied, emotions calcified, experiences reduced to data points. We say we fear machines becoming too human. We fear we've forgotten how to be human ourselves.
https://www.thinkers360.com/tl/blog/members/the-reality-of-the-uncanny-valley-and-its-impact-on-ai-avatars-in-immersive-experiences