If you were to design a robot to assist in a kindergarten, handing out water, tidying and watching out for grazed knees, what would it look like? A bulky, shouty metal hulk? Or a gentle-voiced android that mimicked a carer?
Assuming you are not the Child Catcher, the answer is likely to be the latter. If robots are to provide support in the workplace of the future, they might prove less shocking if they attempt to blend in. Carers tend to be women, so perhaps engineers should recreate them in metal form: with female voices and bobbed helmet hair.
To be human is to anthropomorphise. In an experiment published this year in Nature, participants were shown photographs of a human and a robot hand being cut with a knife. The volunteers felt empathy for the human and the robot.