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Again, the Japanese have identified a market wherein acceptance of robots by the human marketplace depends on their humanoid appearance. Homecare, hospital work, assistance of the elderly, human service, etc.

Haha... Your comments reminded me of this:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/2340/saturday-night-live-old-glory

I would rather have a living, breathing nurse or home health aide, myself, but that's just me. I don't think Androids have that much of a future. Sure, it's interesting and all, but I still say it's over-rated.

Yep.

As I said in a previous comment, I tend to agree with you about the prospects of the market the Japanese have targeted (the human robot helper and worker market). It is not a market that feels right to me at the gut level.

But they know their markets and culture, so...I guess we'll see what happens.

IIRC, a lot of elderly Japanese have no grandchildren, and one of the markets is for dolls that interact with them. The company that created them had to change some of the programming because the dolls were designed to ask questions, and some of the people would get extremely upset when they didn't know the answer.

So, yeah, these Japanese people would prefer living, breathing grandchildren, but the robots are what they got.

In some ways, though, a lot of people would rather deal with robots or androids than real people because real life is messy. That's the reason a lot of guys prefer porn to real women and watching movies about mountain climbing rather than climbing a real mountain.

BTW, downloaded Bladrunner and watched it last night. Don't know what it has to do with this thread, but it does give you the creeps. We always predict science will move both faster and slower than it really does.