Did anybody else find the idea of two doctors speaking with headsets via iRobot guiding their robots out into the hall for a private chat slightly silly? Both doctors are already chatting via the Internet, why not just have Skype like chat with each other directly without having to guide the robot into the hall and communicate through the robots. This is one reason why I don't see this as practical.
I think that the Iraq/Afghanistan wars have done for robotics what WW2 did for jets. These recent wars have funneled a lot of money into robotics. I would hope that we can get enough civilian uses that the investment continues.
Now we need to repeat the 1980's computer revolution for robotics.
The military has been investing huge amounts of money into robotics for decades now, and most of the advancements in capability have been linear (and expensive). But now the exciting thing is that thanks to Willow Garage, Aldebaran-Robotics, and FIRST, the accessibility of robots has fallen to a point where we have thousands of researchers and hobbyists working on robotics constantly, building open-source software and raising the abilities of all robot platforms. Higher accessibility will drive capability exponentially, just like it did in the 1980s.
The cool part is that capability and accessibility are one in the same chain. If you pull from either end, the other follows.
It amazes me in 2012 were still not even close to the level of robotics technology they had in the movie short circuit. (I'm receding to the robots at the beginning, not the part where he became conscious.)
