Before I get into telling you just how good the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N really is – and believe me, it’s fantastic – I need to explain the theory of the uncanny valley.
First hypothesised in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori and more recently applied to artificial intelligence, the uncanny valley is a place our brains stumble through when confronted by an object possessing human likeness. Our affinity increases with likeness, but then falls dramatically to a feeling of unease when an object nears total likeness, before increasing again when true likeness is reached. When we discover the object is indeed a real human.
