POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

I know that the artificial intelligence and the humanoid robots are on the horizon, if not already upon us, but this image is still unsettling:

Getty, Matt Cardy

This explanatory caption was provided by Atlantic’s Photos of the Week for May 11, 2018, compiled by Alan Taylor:

Engineered Arts prosthetic expert Mike Humphrey checks on “Fred,” a recently-completed Mesmer robot that was built at the company’s headquarters in Penryn, in Cornwall, England, on May 9, 2018. Founded in 2004, the Cornish company is a world leader in life-sized commercially-available humanoid robots for entertainment, information, education, and research. The company has successfully sold its fully interactive and multilingual RoboThespian robot to science centers, theme parks and visitor attractions, and to academic and commercial research groups where they are used as research and development platforms. More recently the company has been building a range of lifelike bio-mechanical Mesmer robots. Built on the sensors and software framework already developed for RoboThespian, the Mesmer robots offer extensive interaction but can also move very smoothly, quietly, and naturally.