Only in our electric imagination

I keep reading that 2016 is going to be a pivotal year for "social robots". These are lifelike dummies known as androids that think and talk like a computer programmer's idea of a human.

From a very brief glance at online videos of South Korean robots, such as Nadine the realistic receptionist and "cute" Asuna, a kind of prototype "sexbot", I've learned that the tech press particularly value a robot's ability to get properly mad when a human insults it - with authentic, believable anger.

I guess it makes sense to focus on developing robots' "humanistic" defense mechanisms. For if social robots, and other robots in general, take off in the next few years as much as is being predicted by various authoritative-sounding sources on the Internet that I've just this moment looked at, then there is going to be a lot of resentment flowing toward these clockwork cuckoos in the human nest over the coming decades.