RUW: Philadelphia surrenders to our future robot masters.

From an alarming Philadelphia Inquirer piece, "Advantage: Robots":

Robots are gaining on us.

Thanks to exponential increases in computer power - which is roughly doubling every two years - robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like people.

Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult, perhaps impossible, challenge.

Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains" now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims, or explore craters on Mars.

At a "Robobusiness" conference in Boston last week, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide, and security guard.

You name it, a high-tech wizard somewhere is trying to make a robot do it.

A Japanese housekeeping robot can move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher, and put dirty clothes in a washing machine.