People are idiots. I'm sure that most ghosts have better things to do than punch the living in the kidneys more than once or twice.

And yes, basically. It's expensive and dangerous to send humans into space. But just sending someone alone tends to not turn out well in the long-term, so our goal is to have a more "human" robot to bridge the difference. We've been able to create systems to successfully read human emotions, but I don't incorporate all of that into all of the assistants--it just gets extraneous.