Crossing the Uncanny Valley of Human-System Teaming

Increasingly advanced systems are becoming pervasive in society. They are taking on roles and have abilities that necessitate their teaming with humans. However, the authors argue that we will soon reach a point where the increased embedding of artificially intelligent systems into collaborative teams results in reduced performance. We believe that there is an upcoming “uncanny valley of collaboration” that must be traversed on the way to natural truly productive hybrid teams. In order to avoid potential obstacles to hybrid team progress and safety, we argue that this challenge should be clearly identified and addressed across the larger human system integration community. In this paper, we describe the problem, propose potential solutions, and provide some examples where we are making strides toward bridging this valley.