Nearly one million robots are chugging away around the world right now, doing work that is normally referred to, in robot circles, as “the three Ds”–too dull, dirty, or dangerous to appeal to humans. But anticipating the day these machines take on white collar tasks, the great thinkers of the robotic world are cogitating a lot right now about kansei. It’s a Japanese term that describes a group of perceptions and faculties currently beyond the reach of machines, such as intuition, pleasure and pain, curiosity, emotion, sensitivity, attachment, and creativity.

If robots are to gain widespread acceptance in the workplace, then they too must acquire at least the appearance of kansei, says Shuji Hashimoto, director of the Humanoid Robotics Institute at Waseda University in Tokyo. Otherwise, we humans, fed on a steady diet of evil robot movies, will shun the blinking, bleeping machine in the next cubicle — or even turn it off.