Novelty humanoid exhibits at the World Fair in 1939 and 1940 soon led to more practical Industrial robots (or 'Dedicated' robots) which were created purely for manufacturing, i.e. Building cars, painting, packaging, product inspection and factory assembly. Industrial robots have led to cheaper mass-produced goods - in essence robots have already been making our lives easier for decades. A study revealed there were nearly a million robots in operation world-wide in 2007; over half of them in Asia alone.
Robots are already firmly a part of our lives behind the scenes, but will the perfection of humanoid robots for domestic use be detrimental or beneficial to mankind? Will they make us lazy by doing all our work for us or will they help us understand ourselves better, as scientists hope they will?
Technological advancement is the natural progression of our species. The danger is that we'll come to rely on robots so much that we'll interact with them instead of real people. We'll become a more technically advanced society, but we could also become more isolated as people.
If robots broke down or formed their own consciousness at odds with what we built them to do, metaphorically speaking we'd all be left stuck in a solar-powered car at night with no way to help ourselves get home.
Right now these humanoid robots are still a novelty - machines that shake your hand, do a little dance or take ten minutes to fetch you a cup of coffee - but as time goes on they'll look and act so much like human beings that eventually we won't be able to tell the difference between us and them. Let's hope Asimov's three laws work or we'll all be in big trouble. Judgment Day kind of trouble.
Resources:
http://asimo.honda.com/asimotv/#
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlJgmWTQSk8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimo
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7946780.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanoid_robot
http://www.robots.com/blog.php?tag=48
http://www.dl.ket.org/latin1/mythology/3fables/love/pygmalion.htm