Prediction: terrorist group attacks robots in South Korea or Japan before 2013. They revolt against the robots "stealing" their jobs. In turn robots are reinforced to deal with the new threats. Their spread is not slowed down by the attacks.The attackers will probably not be "terrorists" -although they well may be classified as such- but just unemployed people and students. Attacking a robot will carry increasingly heavier fines and legal punishment.
(Simplifying things a lot...) we could say that all this is due to some converging trends colliding: in one hand, you have cheaper access to more advanced technology in modern societies, leading the way Japan and South Korea. South Korea has made public its government-backed intent to use a growing number of robots in the private and public sphere in the near future.
In the other hand, you have businesses opting for robots instead of employees, which are more expensive and less reliable for the kind of specialized, repetitive work that our society requires.
Things will get so bad and robots -and other automated systems- will take so many jobs that a boiling point will be reached where humans see robots as a threat to their jobs and defend against them in the only way they can, attacking them physically.
However, I can foresee that in this situation robots will be not only armed with special cameras and sensors to detect threats from humans, but also humans will empower robots to defend themselves through an array of offensive and defensive methods varying from actual embedded firearms to automatically activated taser fields around the robot.
If we remember that as we speak great advances are being made in the field of Artificial Intelligence, in a few years we may well have a situation where robots are not only more autonomous and enjoy more independence on how to deal with external -human or otherwise- "threats", but they also have superior intelligence, physical strenght, endurance, faster decision taking processes and less dependance on outer sources of energy.
Japanese humanoid happy to work on in the rainhttp://www.physorg.com/news101623648.html
UPDATE 26/6/07: Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Picker
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/06/robo_picker
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