In 1970, when studying the effects of the appearance of robots, the Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori discovered something strange was going on. The more human a robot’s appearance became, the more people demonstrated empathy towards it up to a certain point at which they felt strong revulsion.
After that point, though, the more humanoid the robot became the more people began to respond positively again. There was a zone of resemblance, of almost‑humanness, that people found deeply disturbing: it was familiar enough for them to begin to engage on a human level only to find the robot deficient in all the usual points of reference. Mori called this the “uncanny valley”.
The game between Manchester City and Newcastle had fallen into the uncanny valley, close enough to football to engage and yet so far from expected norms that it disgusted.
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