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Perhaps we could have killed Osama bin-Laden with a drone, but since he rarely left his compound, our soldiers had to go in and get him instead. In Whitley’s new novel Hybrids, he writes about machine-men who are engineered to be soldiers. The US seems pretty complacent about using drones for warfare, but the UK isn’t quite so sanguine about it: They think that growing use of unmanned aircraft in combat situations raises huge moral and legal issues. They also worry that wars will become more common once armed robots take over the fighting.
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If we use robots in the future, we have to make sure they behave. Scientists are now enmeshed in philosophical discussions about this.

When the legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov penned the “Three Laws of Responsible Robotics,” he forever changed the way humans think about artificial intelligence, and inspired generations of engineers to start creating robots. They have a more realistic attitude about the machines they are creating, so they have rewritten robot “laws.”
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How about never having to iron another shirt again? A German company has invented a heated, inflatable dummy that “irons” shirts for you. “This will be a complement to the lawn mowing and vacuum cleaning robots that already exist,” says economist Jan Karlsson. Since most of us are still doing those chores ourselves, we don’t expect to have our shirts ironed automatically anytime soon.

Celeste Biever writes in New Scientist that the Dressman was invented after an international survey showed that ironing?especially ironing shirts?is the chore that most people dislike the most. “Ironing is so boring,” says Karlsson. “I really think people will use this.”
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When a couple wants to test their ability to take care of a child before they have one, they usually get a pet. Now you can go a step further and for $80,000, you can get a childlike robot called AstroBoy. Sony is working on a robot that can interact with its “parents,” expressing emotions with words, songs and body language. Or you can get a hybrot that’s smart because its brain is made up of living cells harvested from the brain of a rat.

Steve Potter?s rat-controlled robot is a cylindrical machine the size of a coffee mug. It does its thinking with a network of neurons taken from the brains of rat embryos and placed on an electrode-activated silicon chip. This is the first time living neurons have been used to control a robot.
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