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Strange But True

Children are Creepy as Hell

They walk among us and I’m terrified

Victoria Suzanne

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Photo by Georgi Kalaydzhiev on Unsplash

Strange creatures surround us. They walk our streets, they live in our homes. We’re deep in the uncanny valley and no one seems to notice or care except me.

First, what is the Uncanny Valley?

The Uncanny Valley phenomenon has been described as “the eerie or unsettling feeling that some people experience in response to not-quite-human figures”.

It’s why we prefer robots to look like the one on the left, rather than the one on the right:

Photos by Alex Knight and Markus Spiske on Unsplash, collated by author

Put simply, anything that looks human but actually isn’t freaks us the hell out. Despite advances in technology, we’ve never created an artificial being that didn’t have a ‘tell’. Lately, I’ve been noticing people with these tells all around me.

You see them every day

You see them in the supermarket, in the park and on the train. They walk on two legs, just like us, but their gait is…off. Wobbly. Like they know the mechanics of what they’re supposed to be doing, but they haven’t worked out how to…

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