You can tell the robot is happy from its glowing eyes and smile of satisfaction.
Giving this its own post: a tool is itself morally neutral until used by a human, be it for good or ill. That goes for hammers and guns, oil rigs and printing presses, yes, and technology — so far including robots. Ethical import is of, by and for us as people, not our tools.
The difference with robots is that we’re not confident we haven’t outsmarted ourselves and created a tool that perhaps one day will out-human us.
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person.
In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.
It’s a good story, full of quotes like “Just be yourself . . .seems to me like a somewhat naive overconfidence in human instincts” and “It’s an odd twist: we’re like the thing that used to be like us. We imitate our old imitators, in one of the strange reversals in the long saga of human uniqueness.”
Who knows whether human-threshold-reaching robots would be a reality we regular humans could handle?
Greg Bear in Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children imagined a future in which our own human children suddenly become advanced in ways that seem breathtakingly alien — a metaphor perhaps, for humans giving life to robots who then leave us behind as lesser than they? — and Favorite Daughter (more advanced than I am for sure!) once wrote a cautionary tale on this theme, concerned for human ethics no matter what challenges to our own humanity we create for ourselves:
I propose that the budget of the humanities program be doubled, rather than cut back and/or eliminated in any manner. Because when they finally build robots strong enough to take us over, you’re going to want somebody who has not become a mere shell of his former self, less human than machine.
Young Son for his part, is currently intrigued by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 
How about you? Still human enough to think and feel deeply and authentically, to marvel at such stories and wonder what quintessence makes and keeps us humans that way?
Cock of the snook to Lynne who blogs at Schola, for alerting me to the “FOX Geezer” Syndrome which I’m thinking could make a prequel to the Greg Bear books, in which our elderly parents DE-evolve into less-than-human, instead of our young children e-volving into more-than-we.
Another connection between this and that, is television as value-neutral technology, not human and neither humane nor inhumane except in the uses we make of it and the power over our lives we give it.
Public schooling is a tool, too. Here is how Michelle Rhee for example, uses it: to aggrandize herself and her personal schtick, no matter who it hurts in how many ways:
‘I’ll take human ingenuity for $2,000′
Even if IBM’s Watson triumphs on ‘Jeopardy!,’ don’t count out people
By Stephen Baker
February 15, 2011
[...] Snook posts for Banned Books Week every year (this makes six because the blog started just in time for the 2006 celebration, which was the silver anniversary. Last year’s is here: If I Had a Robot, Would I Hammer in the Morning? [...]