When I read Isaac Asimov’s robot novels last year, I found them almost comically outdated. It’s not that I didn’t like the stories, but robots had turned out to be a direction that humanity had not taken. They had been a remote possibility when Asimov wrote the books, but in the end we had focused on other efforts.
Or so I thought.
Now I am not so sure any more. Some things are just harder than others, and while I don’t see much evidence of Robot Laws or full-fledged artificial intelligence, the idea of using robots as perfect killers seems to be pervasive. Seems we’re leaning more to the Terminator side 🙂
But anyway, as I said, some things are hard and just take their time. Look for example at Elon Musk’s announcements of his planned Mars transfer ship. The ship, the project of transporting a hundred people as a first colony, that’s almost exactly what Kim Stanley Robinson proposed in his “Mars Trilogy”. It was not possible when KSR wrote it, it may not be possible yet, but we’re definitely getting near.
I wouldn’t rule out fully autonomous robots any more. It may just take a little longer than Asimov expected.