What Makes Us Human

You may have already seen this video making its way around Facebook and YouTube:
I watched this video first thing the other morning while laying in bed with my husband and our little Daschund Millie. When the office worker kicked the robot, my husband let out a big gasp and in that same moment I also instantly felt uncomfortable, offended even. This lead me to further thought. This is a non-living being, a machine, so why did this bother us so?

Perhaps it was merely the act of a human's ill intention; the seeming cause of harm through violence. I actually wonder if it goes a little deeper than that.

This robot has legs that mimic a terrestrial mammal. So maybe we're projecting some sort of personification onto the machine. We do this all the time already. People commonly name their cars. We've even given names to artificial intelligence services like Apple's Siri. It's as if we're conditioned to want to relate to our creations we designed to serve us. So this begs further inquiry. Are we just uber human-centric, or is our own technological wizardry pushing the very envelope of what we understand as living consciousness itself? If something has the ability to perceive, is that a level of awareness and does that count as consciousness? Do we equate consciousness to life?