Psychologists have uncovered a new uncanny phenomenon called the “clone devaluation effect”

New research published in PLOS One provides evidence that duplicated human faces tend to elicit negative emotions in viewers. The findings serve as a warning that future robotic or cloning technology could provoke unpleasant psychological reactions. “The rapid development of humanoid technology is very exciting for people. However, when I imagined the future mass production of androids, I thought that we might be surrounded by human-like entities with the same face (like Agent Smith in the Matrix),” said study author Fumiya Yonemitsu of Kyushu University, who is also a research fellow at the J...