That's Hasbro's "My Real Baby", which Sherry Turkle devotes a good chapter to in Alone Together. See, MRB was an early ancestor of Pepper, in that it responded to feedback and was designed as a non-threatening human companion. As you might expect, some people attach to it. Some people attach to it too much. Some people, however...

So the semi-spooky thing Hasbro discovered is that while MRB needed to respond to negative feedback, it also needed a mode to straight-up shut down if it experienced too much negative feedback. Why? A disturbing percentage of humans (something like 20%) would just sort of spontaneously kick the shit out of My Real Baby. Young, old, didn't matter. 40-year-old women would suddenly fling the toys at the wall to see what happened. Hasbro made the smart move of going "we're not going to plumb the depths of that abyss" and set a threshold at which point the toys just went inert.

The Uncanny Valley is a poorly-understood phenomenon whose width and breadth we have not yet begun to explore. You or I can consciously know that Pepper is not human, will never be human, should never be human but when it acts just a little too human we need to muthafukin' kill the monster.

Psychopass leverages this with laser-like precision. The smiley happy cop masks are a deliberate feint, a la Brave New World, to harness our discomfort with super-cute synthetic things.

Furbies are hated a hell of a lot more than Beanie Babies for the simple reason that they ape life. Get any sensible person drunk and surround him by helpful, friendly death masks and he'll recognize them for the Frankensteins they are.