Study: Nobody Wants Social Robots That Look Like Humans Because They Threaten Our Identity

Everybody knows that anthropomorphic robots that try to look and act like people are creepy. There's been a bunch of research into just what it is about such androids that we don't like (watch the video below to get an idea of what we're talking about), and many researchers think that we get uncomfortable when we begin to lose the ability to confidently distinguish between what's human and what's not. This is why zombies are often placed at the very bottom of the Uncanny Valley: in many respects, they directly straddle that line, which is why they freak us out so much. The tricky part about robots, however, is that they can manifest "human-ness" in ways that are more than just physical. When robots start acting like humans, as opposed to just looking like them, things can get much more complicated.