What Will a Robotic World Look Like?

A fully-automated Earth in which robots work with humanity in every conceivable way has been imagined a million times over in science fiction books, film, games and television. According to our dreams, we might end up living in a world reminiscent of "WALL·E", in which machines assisted humanity in our environment-shattering quest for more-more-more that ruined the planet; a post-apocalyptic result of AI seeing Homo sapiens as a blight to be wiped out portrayed in "The Terminator"; or an Earth and Solar System where robokind and humans exist together in a strange dichotomy of harmony and distrust as envisioned by the works of Isaac Asimov. If we were to place all of our imagined versions of a robo-enhanced future on a scatter plot, where the X axis is the timeline starting in the present (at 0) and going into the future (say, up to 1,000 years from now), and the Y axis represents the degree to which we get along with our robot companions as a percentage -- with 0 being "Robopocalypse"-level mutually-assured destruction and 100 representing some kind of perfect utopia in which humankind and machines exist together in perfect harmony or have otherwise blended together into a new species -- it might look a little like this: The majority of what many people expect in the nearer future tends to the darker side of things. We compare robotics and the research into artificial intelligence that usually accompanies that with other similarly large advances in technology that often had some scary results. Indeed, work on atomic power began with bombs, led by military programs, and that is where much of the headway is being made today with robotics.