Technology has come on leaps and bounds over the past twenty years or so. Some of the products and devices that we now take for granted couldn’t possibly have been predicted in the 1970s, or even the 1980s.
Who’d have thought that we’d be able to carry our entire music collections around with us in our pockets? Or that we’d be able to watch a film on a device in the palm of our hand?
The technological advances of the late 20th Century and early 21st Century are nothing short of amazing, and we are only just starting to explore the possibilities.
There is one area of technology that has not developed in the way that experts predicted in the 20th Century – robotics.
Many people will remember television programmes like Tomorrow’s World that predicted the technology of the future. Fans of this type of show will remember that robots featured heavily, with experts even predicting that they would be in widespread use by the start of the 21st Century.

They predicted that we’d all have intelligent robots helping us at home, doing things like waking us up in the morning, walking the dog, cleaning our double glazing, or doing the washing up. However, as of yet these robots are yet to become anywhere near common.
One of the closest things to this fantasy becoming reality is Honda’s Asimo. In this video you can see Asimo unscrewing the lid from a bottle, giving people directions and even hopping on the spot. Unfortunately there’s nothing here that would make him useful around the home just yet!
But is this necessarily a bad thing? Plenty of sci-fi films have warned of the dangers of having artificial intelligence in the home – if our robots become too intelligent maybe they could get bored of doing the housework and try to rise up against us…
Whatever way you look at it (well, assuming the robots are kind) having a humanoid with artificial intelligence at our disposal would certainly be handy, and if we always remember Asimov’s laws of robotics – that robots cannot endanger humans and must obey our commands – then we should be able to prevent an apocalypse of our own doing… they’d certainly make the cleaning easier!
How would you feel about having a robot helping out around the house?
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