Robots are better than human (or I might be Japanese)

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Japanese like robots better

I like robots better too, because they are not irrational and have no emotions.
The Japanese understand my feelings towards robots.

What are your feelings towards robots?

There is a direct relationship between the decline in manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and the use of Robots. However this also correlates with an increase in the productivity of the American worker.

I can see a day when Robots will replace "undocumented aliens" as the main focus of the complaint "They took er' jerbs!" (They took our jobs!)

And complaining will be all they can do.
There are no arguments (except people losing their jobs) of building and programming robots to do jobs.

Robots are better than humans in some ways but remember, they were after all created by humans...
So really I can't really compare much...

But the Japanese robots are awesome, I just wished I happened to see one close up.

Historically the complaint that machines where supplanting human workers hasn't been very successful. Look what happened to Old John Henry.

Luddites! All of them!

I voted "Don't care" because there's no "I think they're pretty cool" option. It was either love them or hate them.

Sorry, you're about thirty years too late for that. Robots replaced easily half the auto workers a long time ago. I lost a career to the desktop PC, because suits figured if robots could play music and commercials, who needs a disc jockey to entertain the audience - of course, they weren't figuring on commercial-less iPods, the short-sighted morons...

As far as robots being completely rational - that sounds great, until there's a malfunction. Asimov's Laws of Robotics are a wonderful idea, but there's no preventing a complex man-made device from ever screwing up. How safe would you feel right now if your personal robot was made by Toyota?

I do not know, I do not have a personal robot.

Come to think of it, wasn't it this that caused the man-machine wars in the Matrix saga?

If you watch the Animatrix, there's a 2-part section which explains the origins of the Matrix. SPOILER WARNING: Apparently, the humans were pissed that the robots were completely altering the economy, causing massive job losses and other problems. Eventually after a bunch of hate crimes against the two parties, the robots were banished to somewhere in the Middle East. However, despite the original intention of just letting them rot there, the robots built their own civilization out of the ground. Eventually a war started between the robot civilization and the rest of the world. Since the robot civilization relied on solar energy, the humans came up with a plan called Operation Dark Storm; essentially a worldwide cloud-seeding operation that would permanently block out the sun. The robots, however, had been prepared for this; they began capturing humans and linking them into specialized power plants designed to take advantage of their biological energy. The captured humans were placed into a virtual reality, and the Matrix was born.

I had to vote "I do not care" because my opinion wasn't mentioned--that is, robots simply aren't in the same league with humans. They don't have the same kind of "thought"; they don't have sentience; they have programs instead of true intelligence. Until a robot exists that can blow the Turing test out of the water, I'm not going to be comparing them to humans in the first place.

Even if we do manage to build a sentient robot, I'm guessing that their thoughts will be dramatically different from ours. Consider the way a computer analyzes data, compared to the way a human does--sequential versus associational; one CPU versus lots of neurons. Computers can run circles around us with math, but they don't have even a two-year-old's ability to recognize patterns. They don't have the creativity to deal with situations even slightly out of the norm. Every little change has to be planned for and programmed in. A sentient version of that wouldn't be humanlike; it would be very alien. Chances are, our First Contact will be with our own creations.

(Yes, my description of how computers "think" is slightly autistic-like. Whether that's significant or not, I have no idea.)

But would we not program them to obey us?
Or maybe just not having emotions programmed into them.

Pretty safe, actually. I would just have to step out of its path and it would zoom on by

Any robot smart enough to be considered sentient would be able to alter its own programming in order not to obey an order. If we create sentient free-willed robots, we're going to have to negotiate with them.

robots are great and all but until the a.i. construct takes over they're just tools and toys.

i wouldn't mind having Data around. we could puzzle about the nature of the social order together. (i really don't know if Data matches what would be theoretically possible with a sentient robot, or if he's more complex. but i like him.)

in the end, though, i'm pretty emotional. there are things about human society i really like. if artwork, poetry, etc. became impossible (ex.) it would be a very sad, empty time for me.