I’m in the Media Lab, part of MIT’s sprawling campus in Cambridge, Mass. Like most designated research areas, the one belonging to the Personal Robots Group looks more like a teenage boy’s bedroom than some pristine laboratory—it bursts with knotted cables, old pizza boxes and what are either dissected toys or autopsied robots. Amid the clutter, a 5-foot-tall, three-wheeled humanoid robot boots up and starts looking around the room. It’s really looking, the oversize blue eyes tracking first, and the white, swollen, doll-like head following, moving and stopping as though focusing on each researcher’s face. Nexi turns, looks at me. The eyes blink. I stop talking, midsentence, and look back. It’s as instinctive as meeting a newborn’s roving eyes. What do you want? I feel like asking. What do you need? If I was hoping for dispassionate, journalistic distance—and I was—I never had a chance.

“Right now it’s doing a really basic look-around,” researcher Matt Berlin says. “I think it’s happy, because it has a face to look at.” In another kind of robotics lab, a humanoid bot might be motivated by a specific physical goal—cross the room without falling, find the appropriate colored ball and give it a swift little kick. Nexi’s functionality is more ineffable. This is a social robot. Its sole purpose is to interact with people. Its mission is to be accepted.

That’s a mission any truly self-aware robot would probably turn down. To gain widespread acceptance could mean fighting decades of robot-related fear and loathing. Such stigmas range from doomsday predictions of machines that inevitably wage war on mankind to the belief that humanoid robots will always be hopelessly unnerving and unsuitable companions.

For Nexi, arguably the biggest star of the human–robot interaction (HRI) research field, fame is already synonymous with fear. Before visiting the Media Lab, I watched a video of Nexi that’s been seen by thousands of people on YouTube. Nexi rolls into view, pivots stiffly to face the camera and introduces itself in a perfectly pleasant female voice. If the goal was to make Nexi endearing, the clip is a disaster. The eyes are big and expressive, the face is childish and cute, but everything is just slightly off, like a possessed doll masquerading as a giant toddler. Or, for the existentially minded, something more deeply disturbing—a robot with real emotions, equally capable of loving and despising you. Viewers dubbed its performance “creepy.”

Now, staring back at Nexi, I’m an instant robot apologist. I want to shower those clips with embarrassingly positive comments, to tell the haters and the doubters that the future of HRI is bright. There’s no way seniors will reject the meds handed to them by chattering, winking live-in-nurse bots. Children, no doubt, will love day-care robots, even if the bots sometimes fail to console them, or grind to an unresponsive halt because of buggy software or faulty battery packs. To turn today’s faceless Roombas into tomorrow’s active, autonomous machine companions, social robots need only to follow Nexi’s example, tapping into powerful, even uncontrollable human instincts.

That’s why Nexi’s metallic arms and hands are drifting around in small, lifelike movements. It’s why Nexi searches for faces and seems to look you in the eye. When it blinks again, with a little motorized buzz, I realize I’m smiling at this thing. I’m responding to it as one social, living creature to another. Nexi hasn’t said a word, and I already want to be its friend.

As it turns out, knowing your brain is being hacked by a robot doesn’t make it any easier to resist. And perhaps that’s the real danger of social robots. While humans have been busy hypothesizing about malevolent computers and the limits of rubber flesh, roboticists may have stumbled onto a more genuine threat. When face to face with actual robots, people may become too attached. And like human relationships, those attachments can be fraught with pitfalls: How will grandma feel, for example, when her companion bot is packed off for an upgrade and comes back a complete stranger?

When a machine can push our Darwinian buttons so easily, dismissing our deep-seated reservations with a well-timed flutter of its artificial eyelids, maybe fear isn’t such a stupid reaction after all. Maybe we’ve just been afraid of the wrong thing.