You’ve probably already seen Ameca. The bot got into the public consciousness in 2021. Elon Musk responded to the video with one word, Yikes. Chrissy Teigen retweeted with four words absolutely. the fuck. not.

We were incredibly surprised, says Morgan Roe, Roe puts it down to Ameca’s not-quite-robot, not-quite-human appearance.

Its body is all metal and plastic, its face is a deliberately genderless and nonhuman gray. It has 17 individual motors inside its head controlling its movements and expressions. But its facial features are surprisingly vivid and emotive. And it’s this combination of artificial and lifelike that Roe says speaks to our collective vision of what humanoid robots will look like in the future.

The company has been making a lineup of bots and showing them to people on CES. Each bot is designed and built from 3D in-house scans of real people, and it is freaking cool. This bot isn’t for the CES. It doesn’t jump like the bots made by Boston Dynamics. There are almost 10 years before a robot-like Ameca serves as a service bot. Ameca doesn’t have skin tones, with a translucent plastic skull, the creator said to a CNET reporter all features that could make it look more human are removed, because you step into that uncanny valley of creepiness and being startled by it