Robot civil rights -- The future?

It won't be long before we all have robot butlers bringing each of us a delicious mug of Bovril while we lounge around the pool all day, letting Roomba and her cousins do our "people work" for us. In fact, some people are suggesting we deal with the issue of robot rights now -- before they get all uprise-y with their laser hands and death ray eyes.

Writing for Computer Law and Security Review, Anna Russel, from the University of San Diego (very smart, trust us) points out that if robots look, think and act like humans, it's going to be pretty hard to justify treating them as less than human from a purely legal standpoint.

One of Russel's most important points is that robots might want to do it with human beings. And robots are probably way more awesome at sex than people are, because they're robots.

All this robot-rights, human-robot-sex stuff, coupled with a Uruguayan man at the pub last week who looked just like Gaius Baltar has got us thinking that while we might not know the solution to this moral quandary, we're guessing it involves appeasing the robots, so that we don't have to start replacing swear words with words that sound almost exactly like swear words. And if that doesn't work, then, like the bumper sticker from the future says, "Shart happens."