Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

The answer, of course, in the grand antipodean tradition of sheep jokes, is “yes, if they are Australian”. (by antipodean, I use the popular term for those of australasian abode; our antipodes are in fact somewhere in Spain, but for some reason the hispano-portuguese rivalry doesnt seem to have yielded quite the same rich vein of agrarian humour)

You may in fact recognise the quote - its the title of a sci-fi work by Philip K Dick,  on which the movie classic Bladerunner was based.

Robots certainly have been well represented in popular science fiction, nothing announcing “The Future” quite as well as an android clanking about the place.

gosh there are so many - R2D2 and C3PO, Wall-E, Arnie Schwarzenegger (I mean Terminator, but now that I think about it ...)

My favourite probably dates me a bit - the robot from Lost In Space.

He was all noise and little action, as he never actually DID much, apart from twirling his robotic arms around at the slightest threat ("Danger, Will Robinson!") - the first robotic politician?

But is it just me, or are our visions of the future becoming darker? Ridley-Scott’s dank and gloomy sets were just the start of it, before the Terminator series of red-eyed malevolent androids started striding across their apocalyptic playground. (what is it with the little red eyes, anyway? The Cylons suffered from the same affliction - is there some robogenetic link between eye redness and a disposition to slaughter everything in sight?) 

(btw don’t google the term robogenetic, I just made it up)

Whatever happened to the helpful little tin cans like the Jetson’s Rosey the robotic housemaid,

 or R2D2 from  Star Wars? (We’ll forget Twiki from the Buck Rogers TV series, I kept waiting for that moronic little robot dwarf to get its diodes fried, but no such luck) 

Generally, however, our inclination to build robots in our own inefficient two-legged likeness usually causes androids to bask in the warm glow of our own narcissistic egos. OK, legs are great for climbing steps,  but surely this upright posture thing is over-rated? What about something like this mechanical cockroach, or this jumping buggy - one thing is for sure, if a wheeled buggy that can jump roughly 100 times its own height scales up ok, rush hour traffic could get a lot more interesting.

Ok, so what’s YOUR favourite robot?