This isn’t about safety, says Jim Lawton, Rethink’s CMO. Baxter's touch sensors are what makes it safe to be near. When it turns to "look" at you, it doesn't continue to track your presence. It’s all a show for the humans, building trust by signaling that it’s going to do something, then doing it. It’s not a powerful, inscrutable machine. It’s a friendly, googly-eyed coworker. "We get an awful lot of feedback about how friendly the robot is," says Lawton. "People always say that the robot is smiling at me — which is intriguing, because it has no mouth. It’s all happening at a very subconscious level."

Nor do things need faces for humans to imbue them with human qualities. The barest hint of agency will do. People name their Roombas and soldiers develop attachments to PackBots, the bomb-defusing droids by the same company, iRobot, repairing them rather than replacing them and giving them funerals when they’re beyond saving. If something moves like a living thing, says social roboticist Cynthia Breazeal, if it appears to move under its own power, or to orient itself toward you, our brain puts it in a category of things governed by mental states rather than the laws of physics, a psychological quality called animacy.

But if you’re not careful, animacy can backfire. Robots too similar to people fall into the uncanny valley. Totally inhuman ones, like Darpa’s Big Dog, appear unpredictable and threatening. Cuteness lets designers take robotic animacy and give it a friendly, comforting spin.

Which helps explain why Google’s self-driving car is so cute. Google is asking people, both passengers and pedestrians, to put a great deal of trust in their robot driver. Lawton pointed out how disconcerting it could be to cross the street in front of a self-driving car. Normally you could make eye contact with the driver, see that she sees you, and cross. How do you instill that same level of trust with a robot car? You give the car a friendly face: a bulbous body, eye-like headlights, button nose, and wide smile. It’s a design straight out of the baby-schema.

Breazeal’s robot, Jibo, is even cuter, though it lacks a face. Spun out of the MIT Media Lab, Jibo is designed to be a general purpose household robot, reminding you about emails, taking pictures, and reading stories to kids. In the two weeks it’s been on Indiegogo, it has raised over a million dollars.

Breazeal, a former student of Rodney Brooks, has spent her career designing robots that interact with humans in a social manner. For Jibo, she decided to focus on form and movement instead of facial features. An animator on her team had the insight that human movement happens in arcs, whereas robots traditionally move rectilinearly, so they constructed Jibo out of three swiveling rings and topped it with a big, baby-schema style head. In lieu of a "face," it has a single eye that blinks sleepily to show you it’s paying attention. It’s cute like the Pixar lamp is cute, swinging its big head around with clumsy enthusiasm.