Being designed as human-facing placed him in a curious halfway house of constant cognitive dissonance, able to appreciate all these aspects of the human condition all the way up to the point where he could note their absence in himself, even as his programming impelled him to act as though he had them. All those little tweaks to his algorithms to try to stitch shut the gaping wound of the uncanny valley as much as was (in)humanly possible. And all for a species whose reaction to those things made in its image was so wildly inconsistent, so that a robot given a human face could send them
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