From Silicon Valley to the Uncanny Valley

The City of Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area , where tech companies like Google and InOrbit are headquartered, recently celebrated the 150th anniversary of its fire department with a parade. This got me thinking about the arc of history and how it connects the past to the present and beyond. In order to appreciate all the current innovations in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, it helps to understand where it all started.

Most people don't know that Mountain View, located between San Francisco and San Jose, is the birthplace of Silicon Valley. The first semiconductor startup to make transistors commercially using silicon, Shockley Semiconductor Lab, was set up here 70 years ago.

At the time, this location was far from an obvious choice; in fact, it came to be almost by accident. The company founder, William Shockley, was born in London but was raised in Palo Alto. He attended CalTech and then MIT, and went on to work at Bell Labs in the East Coast for two decades. As he was looking to start his own company, he wanted to be close to his ailing mother, who had moved to Palo Alto to teach mining at Stanford.

Given the university's current reputation for being where many technology startups get started, people might assume that Shockley wanted to hire Stanford graduates. However, most of the engineering talent at the time was in the East Coast. In fact, Shockey had a hard time convincing his first hires to move across the country, but he succeeded because his reputation preceded him; he won a Nobel prize shortly after starting his company.

Shockley Semiconductor Lab was located on 391 San Antonio Rd. At the time, it was surrounded by orchards. The site has been redeveloped, with sculptures of those early electronic components and circuits adorning the sidewalk.

Many of the early employees at the company left shortly to start a competing company; they were dubbed the "traitorous eight" by Shockley. Fairchild Semiconductor set up shop less than 2 miles away and developed the first commercially practical integrated circuit. Some of them went on to create other iconic companies, such as Intel, AMD and venture-capital firm Kleiner-Perkins.

In the decades since, Mountain View has been inextricably linked to the evolution of technology. A young Steve Jobs attended elementary and middle school in Mountain View. NASA Ames Research Center, Google, Intuit and many other companies, including some that came and went like Silicon Graphics, have set up shop here.

Let's fast forward to the present. As AI and robotics are developing at a rapidly accelerating pace, Silicon Valley is once again at the epicenter. NVIDIA makes the silicon chips that power a lot of the latest AI developments, as well as a large number of autonomous robots; the rest are probably running chipsets from Intel or AMD, and all 3 companies are headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.

AI leaders such as Open AI and Anthropic are based in San Francisco, while Meta and Google, based in Menlo Park and Mountain View respectively, are weaving AI into every product.

Autonomous vehicles from companies like Waymo, Zoox and Nuro are seen on the streets of Mountain View every day, while Tesla and Figure AI are developing humanoid robots in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. Silicon Valley Robotics estimates there are around 1,000 robotics and autonomy companies in the area.

As we move headlong into this era of AI and robots everywhere and these technologies, whether in the form of bipedal robots or online avatars, become more humanlike, our fascination may turn into unease. Masahiro Mori, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, coined the term “uncanny valley” in his book titled Bukimi No Tani (不気味の谷) published in 1970.

Mori hypothesized this psychological and emotional response, where technological creations that appear more like humans first elicit a positive, empathetic response, but at some point the reaction turns to revulsion or fear. However, this response can turn positive again as the technology becomes more indistinguishable from humans.

Based on my news feed and everyday conversations, which are heavily skewed towards AI and robotics, there is no doubt that we are moving inexorably from Silicon Valley to the Uncanny Valley.