Will we ever learn to love our robot future? With rapid advances in this technology – sex robots, companion bots and more are said to be around the corner – it seems a reasonable question to ask, especially given almost every fictional account of that future is still a dark "us and them" tale. With the reboot of sci-fi yarns such as Westworld and Humans on television, androids – the class of robots designed to be utterly human-like – are once again capturing our imaginations. It was in 1970 that professor Masahiro Mori from the Tokyo Institute of Technology predicted that as we try to make robots more human, we would reach a point where we were disturbed and repulsed by them as they became almost, but not quite, human. He labelled this effect the "uncanny valley" – hypothesising that when technology improved and robots became truly human-like, then we would once again feel comfortable with them.