djfourmoney wrote: I don't disagree with Robots that will take care of children and the elderly will be widely available in the next 10-15 years. What I was saying is that acceptable replacements for female humans (think Blade Runner) won't happen until the end of the century for several reasons.
1) The pending Energy Crisis will force most of the smart minds to work on finding alternative energy sources. While work will continue on robotics it won't be with Manhattan Project type budgets. On top of that, we would have past safe levels of green house gases (if we haven't already) and more strange weather events and flooding will happen (deaths).
2) The economic crisis if you can't tell by the riots in Athens will continue and get deeper as I believe as others feel the Bankers have won, at least this round. Protest and Riots will continue, why do you think Congress voted for (everybody but one or two) NDAA. They want to outlaw decent. There will not be any investment in things like robotics for anything but for replacing line workers on at factories going forward. Also you have politicians blaming everybody BUT the Banks for all these issues, so while that continues, no grand investment in robotics.
Here's the scoop, albeit, direct investment in let's say a Robot for 'Maid Service', with 100% Darryl Hannah look-a-like features, may not be tenable the way VC financing works today, however, realize this ... a security camera in 5-7 years will be attached to a desktop, with immense computational power. And for the most part, what limits vision processing algorithms today is just that, not enough brute force. But shortly, it'll be available and then, security firms will be able to monitor all activities outside of one's apartment w/o needing a person to watch each and every camera. This is an application which will get tons of financing from both the govt and the private sectors.
Well, part of the spill over effect, from the above Big Brother projects, is that it'll then be a part of robotics, moving ahead. Thus, I don't see that Robots need direct, guided financing, like let's say Nuclear Fusion reactors. It's more of a convergent technology, in terms of software-hardware integration. As for of AI/robotic R&D, Japan will lead, in terms of consumer projects and the US, in terms of DoE/DoD work. Robot apps will then be done by consumer products companies like Apple, Honda, Mitsubishi, IBM (think mobile Watson), etc.
As for energy crisis, in the past decade, a lot of the US Shale has been coming online and thus, fossil fuel shortages have been postponed for another few decades. And if Synfuels (coal->petrol) also gets re-started, perhaps another two centuries. Yes, Japan isn't as lucky here, but they seem to find ways of coping. Perhaps, the US can finally have a trade surplus with Japan, if the Dakotas can produce in excess, via 2020. We'll see.
All and all, the Blade Runner perfected female droid is clearly Sci-Fi, and 22nd century, but I think Spielberg's A.I., at least some of the crude models in the movie, will be available in 15-25 years.