1 Would you prefer to have a domestic robot that does most of your mundane housework and other tasks for you? Or would you prefer to wear a personalized mech-suit that would let you “work” tirelessly on your tasks with extra-human strength and pin-point accuracy?



I think domestic robots will become popular at people's homes (at least among middle and upper class families) while mech-suits will become popular in the military and commercial industry. There may even be robots for rent, ranging from assistance of the disabled to prostitution. Me personally, I think it would be cool to own a robot servant, but I'd probably get board with it too quickly, and that's not good if it cost a fortune.



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2 Would you want a “driverless car” to drive you safely to all your destinations, freeing you to sleep or read this article or simply sight-see during the journey? Or do you think you’d prefer the visceral experience, always, of hands-on-the-wheel driving?



I can see how a driverless vehicle would be useful for the elderly, the disabled, for mass transit or for perhaps long-distance journeys, but I still prefer to be in complete control over my vehicle, or at least to have the option of taking immediate control at any given moment. Besides, if it fails to detect an obstacle or pedestrian and somebody gets hurt or killed as a result, I'd be responsible either way!



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3 Can you envision a future in which robots (androids) become so sophisticated that they become absolutely indistinguishable from humans?



Yes, yes I do. I can easily envision a future where you can walk down the street and pass dozens of androids without even noticing them. Mentally, however, they're still machines, and that would probably be quite obvious after a couple of minutes interacting with them. If robots became self-aware and capable of thinking like us, chances are they wouldn't want to look like us; we are very inefficient creatures, especially by a machine's standards.



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4 If a robot is in every way as sentient (self-aware), intelligent and emotionally wired as a human, is ownership of such a “machine” possible? Or would this be a form of slavery? Will robots eventually have to be granted the same human rights as people?



That's a hard one....I'm all for giving all sentient intelligences equal rights, but the robots would still depend on us to build them, provide them with energy, and pretty much keep them "alive." I think if robots ever did become self-aware, there may be a sort of a reluctant alliance between us and them, since they would be nothing without us. Some of the robots would be scared of us, some of them would hate us, and maybe some of them may look up to us like gods, and almost all of them would kiss our asses because they would know that we can very easily wipe them out. "Don't piss off those damn dirty humans if you want your energy and not to kill us all," they'd be saying to one another.



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5 At some evolutionary point, will robots possess a “soul” just like a human soul? Will human society evolve quickly enough socially to keep up with a technologically advanced future in which a robot and human can fall in love... and produce android-human children?



First off, if true human-robot hybrid children were to even exist, as opposed to cyborgs born as pure human or robots with organic components, the robots would have to consist entirely of nanobots that behaved like human cells that could easily merge with human DNA...I'm talking ultra-advanced technology here, many thousands of years in the future! I don't see what would be stopping some people from falling in love and having sex with robots, nor do I see how it would be impossible for a robot to simulate every aspect of what could be considered having a soul, but the difference between simulating a soul and actually having one may very well be if God or whatever divine force there is out there wills it.