Essay --

Every day, advances in technology lead us nearer and nearer to fully autonomous robots, but even today, robots play a huge role in our lives. Robots exist obviously in software, just look at your smartphone, but robots in hardware exist too, recently, robots such as â€Å"Asimo,† â€Å"Watson,† and â€Å"Deep Blue† were able to perform actions which were thought to be exclusively human such as scaling stairs, making meaningful conversation, and playing chess. But with so many robots already existing, and the rapid progress we are making in the field of robotics, will robots eventually become the dominant life form? This question has puzzled philosophers and sci-fi authors alike for decades; however, the truth of the matter is that robots already have taken over. Without robots in our lives, we simply could not survive as we are. Additionally, robots are not plagued by consciousness, and would never jeopardise their own existence as humans so often do. Finally, ro bots today have the ability to reproduce themselves; this innate and conventionally biological trait is what turns a mere object into an animate life-form. Robots play an integral part in our society, they run our businesses, maintain our economy and do our manufacturing, without them, the routines we have set would crumble. Robots however, are not dependant on human existence; they could theoretically remain self-sufficient forever. By 2014, active cell phones will outnumber humans. These devices are a prime example of consumer robotics and artificial intelligence; we are connected to them at all times, and could not communicate without them. Furthermore, we rely on our robots to run our industry, manufacturing, business administration and plant automation would not be possible without ... ...anufacture. This is shown in many robotic assembly lines, where robots are able to produce a product, or indeed another robot, in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do so. This vastly superior reproduction process not only qualifies robots as a bona fide life form, but also sets them higher from humans with respect to dominance. Robots play a huge role in the life of the human race, but robots, while they are the servants of the human race, are dominant already. Robots are quicker, smarter and more powerful than any biological life form, pocket calculators will outsmart even the cleverest humans, it is for this reason that we rely on them so much, and with them having a greater survivability and a better reproduction system than humans, it is obvious why robots already are superior, and therefore more dominant in numbers, strength and size, than humans.