Yeah, the advent of robots walking among us has tons of unsettling potential, if they're going to be mostly deployed and controlled by a small handful of megacorps. We've seen how poorly that works out in other domains.

There are some big upsides to robotics developing to the point where one could have a safe, reasonably helpful home robot, though. It'd be a huge boon to the quite large population of people -- mostly elderly, but not exclusively -- with mobility issues. As the head of Carnegie Mellon's computer science department once told me, "there are a couple million Americans with enough mobility issues that if they drop their TV remote on the ground, they'll just have to wait several hours or days until someone comes by to pick it up for them."

So there's a big potential for robotics that could help a lot of people retain more autonomy ...

But yeah, it'd be better if that future weren't delivered to us by one or two massive firms