Humanoid robots were long regarded as progress. This book shows why they were, in fact, a cultural sedative. Rethinka observes an era in which machines had to look human because responsibility, leadership, and decision-making ceased to be understood once they no longer had faces. At its centre is not technology, but a cognitive error: the assumption that proximity replaces competence, that embodiment creates trust, and that humanity must be visible in order to be effective. *The Last Human Illusion* is an elegy to the simulation of the human and a precise reconstruction of what disappeared when systems began to carry what had previously been attributed to persons. Not a book about the future. Not a technology essay. But a calm, unrelenting retrospective on an illusion that was necessary in order to leave it behind.