The answer lies in the feeling of the uncanny. Whether it is viewed from the perspective of the creator or the spectator of the mechanical creation, each and all sources of their fascination roots from the uncanniness of automatons. The sources of fascination of automatons described in this essay are thus categorizations of people’s reactions towards the feeling of the uncanny when encountered with their mechanical simulacrum. But this necessitates the automatons to resemble the appearance of a human being. Freud discusses the fact that the feeling of uncanny is also experienced when a person encounters a patient of mental illness in his essay The Uncanny. This is because we are able to see the resemblance between ourselves and the patient but are conflicted with the incomprehensible actions of our mimesis. It is the same case with the automatons: we succeed in associating them in terms of physical appearance, but are met with challenges of understanding that such lifelike creature can be made in the hands of man or comprehending that what allows the automaton to “live” is a set of gears. 

When the day that automatons pass the Turing test and thus becoming indistinguishable from humans, meaning that the feeling of the uncanny will become eradicated, what will it mean to be a “human”? Will it reduce to mean a being that has a finite life? Right now, these questions seem like a blurb of a science fiction novel and may seem far-fetched to take seriously, but with the continuing interest in the automatons, it may not be so far from now that we begin to attempt to answer these questions.