Turning AI Chatbots Into Digital Humans

The term "uncanny valley" refers to that unsettling feeling you get when looking at an android that has been made to appear human. Of course, the problem goes away when we can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans. A paper published last week by New Yawk University claims that "bots are more efficient than humans at certain human-machine interactions, but only if they are allowed to hide their non-human nature." In other words, once we're past that whole uncanny valley problem, we're better served letting people think they're interacting with a human when in fact it's just artificial intelligence perfected. This raises a very important question.