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Utterquidaunce: The Uncanny Valley

Tasmanian tigers. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.


"Outrecuidance" is arrogance, or conceit.

Derived from England’s Norman Rulers' Angevin French, its Middle English cognate was utterquidaunce.

A lovely word! Let's bring it back!

Down in Dallas, Colossal Biosciences almost has the genome complete

and plans to recreate the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine,

an extinct marsupial resident of what once was called Van Diemen’s Land,

using as proxy its relative the fat-tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata).†

The logical extensions of this lie close to hand,

and the view from here into the Uncanny Valley‡ is fine!

(I pluck these fragments from the Internet—all handy data.)

Perhaps one day we’ll be able to resurrect

a Genghis Kahn, Stalin, or maybe Hitler—

If they're what’s wanted, who’s to say?

All we’ll need’s a suitable "dunnart" and a smidgen of their DNA.

A tempting project for the outrecuidant brain:

some near-tomorrow, in a scientific jump,

Colossal Bioscience may conjure up a faux Donald Trump,

who'll make Van Diemen's Land great[er] again!


Dunnarts


† “Colossal Biosciences have assembled a near-complete Tasmanian tiger genome and developed artificial reproductive technologies that could help de-extinct the species.”

“Most complete Tasmanian tiger genome yet pieced together from 110-year-old pickled head,” Live Science, https://www.livescience.com/animals/extinct-species/most-complete-tasmanian-tiger-genome-yet-pieced-together-from-110-year-old-pickled-head


‡ “[I]n climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley.”—Masahiro Moti, https://spectrum.ieee.org/an-uncanny-mind-masahiro-mori-on-the-uncanny-valley

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Photo by Peter Dreyer

 Cyclops by Christos Saccopoulos, used by kind permission of the sculptor.

Copyright © 2023 - by Peter Dreyer

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