I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don't have to eat... eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.
The question is, you know, will someone accidentally build a robot that takes over from us? And that's sort of like this lone guy in the backyard, you know - 'I accidentally built a 747.' I don't think that's going to happen.
I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.
Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future.
I do think, in time, people will have, sort of, relationships with certain kinds of robots - not every robot, but certain kinds of robots - where they might feel that it is a sort of friendship, but it's going to be of a robot-human kind.
Our nano-quadrotor robots are made to be as lightweight as possible: less than a fifth of a pound and palm-sized. They can do an aerial backflip in half a second, accelerate at two Gs, and fly rotor blade to rotor blade in three-dimensional formations - and they do all this autonomously.
And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.
Normally, in the presence of radiation, communication links fail. But with autonomous robots, you don't need communications.
