Beyond the Uncanny Valley: Masahiro Mori and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This essay examines Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s influential theory of the uncanny valley, which holds that humans are attracted to robots that bear some resemblance to humans, and are repelled by robots that resemble humans too much, experiencing these all-too-human robots as eerie and uncanny. It argues that, in ignoring time and lived experience, the uncanny valley inscribes exclusionary boundaries around the human that are presented as inherent. The essay places Mori’s theory into conversation with Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and what it identifies as the novel’s ontology of entanglement between human and nonhuman. From this conversation it suggests that rather than wielding Mori’s uncanny valley to uncritically replicate and reify our biases about the human, the uncanny valley can be viewed as a site that renders visible these boundaries and normative conceptions so that we might expand our visions of the human beyond them, while examining the histories by which these boundaries emerge.