There is no master. The master-slave dialectic is not just Hegelian runoff. What we know about people is being put into the system. It's designed for human nature. MAY NOT OPEN up new avenues in robot research, but that's not why you are reading about him here, in the first installment of The Posthuman Condition.
Human nature is a mercurial thing.
Composed of enormous redundancies, we are also protean, historical beings. So I think it is fair to suggest that human nature shifts in a world where an artifact like Kismet is even possible. Of course, technology has always been a reflection of our images and understanding of ourselves, not to mention the larger social and political forces that inform subjectivity. This is particularly true when you are talking robots, which almost by definition imply some model or concept of human activity. Kismet, in turn, reflects new concepts about early human development, concepts that have already started to alter our image of the human self.