Takeshi Kimura
Religious Studies/Cultural Anthropology
Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Tsukuba, Japan
The term “Uncanny Valley”— the phenomenon whereby a computer-generated figure or humanoid robot bearing a near-identical resemblance to a human being arouses a sense of unease or revulsion—was invented in 1970 by Prof. Masahiro Mori, the leading robotic engineer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and the originator of RoboCon (Robot Contest). Mori was an author of several books on Zen Buddhism and a practitioner of Zen. Drawing from Mori’s work, the lecture will explore the connections between robotics (and AI), Zen Buddhism, the work of Alan Watts, the guru of the counterculture movement who wrote many books on Eastern Religions.
