Stem-well's

In Thursday’s class we watched a clip from the TED website about the Economy, stem-cells, and what Santa does when it’s not winter time. I haven’t given stem-cells much thought, partly because it wierds me out, and that I wasn’t really sure if it was legal In the United States to do such research. I should have figured that it was though, because the US really has that “what if someone else gets it before we do” mentality. We had it during the atomic bomb, and we sure as hell aren’t going to let Europe have stem-people before we do. Near the end of the TED talk, the presenter was talking about how we are gaining all of this mechanical knowledge and showed the clip of the robot dog the army has been working on to carry supplies, and tied it into how scientists are learning to take stem-cells and replicate organs and pieces of the human body. WHAT! That absolutely blows my mind. Imagine going into your grocery store and when it comes time to check out, your being helped by a robot disguised as a human, with human like organs and exterior, but a programmed brain. Thousands of jobs could be lost to these stem-people because they would never get tired, most likely never make mistakes and could be programmed to always be amiable.
But what would happen when one of these robots committed suicide? Or if a robot put in a request for vacation? Is that when we would know they have reached human status. That was a question posed in class, and I think would be one of the ultimate deciding factors for when a robot is no longer a robot.