right now, the thought of a robot so realistic the average person can't tell if it is human or not is quite unreasonable. but assuming we don't destroy ourselves with our primitive tools, such elegant ones are surely part of our inevitable course. do you think their introduction into mainstream society will work itself out? to that i say, ever seen a HIRE UNION bumper sticker? we are a people who, even if we have dinner on our own family's table, care who else was able to feed their family that day. i don't have great faith that this is an evolutionary checkpoint that is going to work itself out.

predicting or theorizing how society unfolds through the advance of robotics (or anything else for that matter) is a grand exercise, one asimov handles masterfully. obviously we or even our children's children will not know how close he came but does that really matter? at the turn of the final page, it's about the cerebral gymnastics and serves as the one great advantage fiction does have over fact.

although, one point already straying from his vision; tobacco. in asimov's future, smoking is still very much part of society which, given the last ten or so years, just doesn't seem like a pony you want to put friday's check on. but considering when his stuff was written, it's an easy thing to slip through the cracks and is a testament to how challenging predicting what a society will look like a thousand or even a hundred years from now truly is.