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Oh, that's what you meant. The Robot Carers thread title threw me. I thought you meant Robot Careers, not Robot Caregivers.
Robotics may be the next real revolution changing our society in a similar way to how the advent of the Internet Age has changed things.
I guess that we could envision things going the way of I, Robot or Wall-E but I suspect that neither is entirely on the mark. I do think that robots will increasingly be constructed to take on tasks either too dangerous (bomb disposal) or too mundane for humans to perform. Automation is nothing new, but the age of the personal robot isn't too far off.
As an aside, the hospital where I work (or rather that my offices reside adjacent to since I don't actually work for the hospital) has implemented a pair of robot carts that run samples and documents between the hospital and the clinical labs. It is about a half-mile walk inside the building complex. The robots have collision avoidance and follow a pre-determined path. They do have the ability to call elevators and select floors. I would guess that they do that via radio frequencies. They aren't that big of a deal to the staff around here, but we do operate in central Kentucky. Some of the patients visiting our hospital are pretty 'backwoodsy'. I wonder what they make of the bots roaming our halls.
/I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
//Had to be said in a thread on robots.
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