Sherry Turkle, a robo-ethicist at MIT, spends a number of chapters on the relationships between people and machines in her book "Alone Together." one of the interesting discussions is on the MIT's robot "COG": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-4vj_S46jY You'll note that it isn't human. At all. Yet a number of students - graduate students at MIT pursuing higher education in artificial intelligence - got quite upset when they discovered that Cog spends a fair amount of time in a dark room turned against the wall. They consider it "inhumane." There's a difference between a robot following a script and tricking us into feeling that it's "human" and a robot that's synthesizing responses. You'll note that Cog and his compatriot Kismet aren't so much following a script as they're heuristically pulling shit out of their ass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KRZX5KL4fA Yet Kismet and Cog feel more "human" because they aren't aping. Something that Sherry Turkle holds as her synthesis over three books: machines aren't human, machines will never be human, but the parts of humanity they lack we are eager and willing to fill in around them. Perhaps because Kismet and Cog are further down in the Uncanny Valley than the creepy gynoids that the Japanese seem to favor, we find them less repulsive... while at the same time finding them more alien.