/sci/ - Science & Math

At first I thought it'd be the "other hominids that could be dangerous to us for whatever reason" (they wouldn't necessarily be dumber and more british than us; just different-looking and tribalistic, just like we would be to them), but I'm kind of skeptical now. I don't think we'd get the same uncanny valley reaction.

I think it could be an aversion to deception/disguise, deformity/disease, or both. Ancient warring hominids probably often wore crude masks for a variety of reasons, and those kind of resemble the faces of robots and such. We all still have a natural reaction when people wear certain kinds of masks that look like faces but clearly aren't quite faces.

Or certain afflictions could maybe change face features enough that we'd associate it with something to stay away from.

Or maybe these are all just-so stories and it's a non-specific association for anything we're unfamiliar with and which doesn't follow symmetry patterns that occur in nature. We're always trying to predict things in our environment, and that's so new and unfamiliar that it generates a feeling of fear and anxiety. The same's true of certain shapes and creatures in horror movies, for example. It's just so alien to us and makes us uneasy, because we don't know how to deal with it. There's nothing else out there that really fits that pattern, whereas a regular robot kind of looks like a machine, and we're used to machines. An ancient human would probably be extremely freaked out by many modern machines, like cars.

So maybe it's just fear of the totally unknown.

Also we dedicate a ton of specialized function to interpreting and memorizing human faces, so when we see something very face-like but also not, it may send a particularly powerful error signal that might make the brain start questioning the whole environment. Other strange facial alterations kind of have the same "short circuit" effect, where you're kind of stuck in a loop you don't know how to get out of.