Why? Because you can now use your brain as a joystick. Because a software program was cited for practising law without a license and you can now get a drug-release robo-tooth implant. Just watch this robot learning to walk.

South Korea is creating an ethical code for the robots who will become "key companions to human beings," like the guard dragons protecting homes in Japan. Will our new companions develop animal instincts? If we died at home and no-one noticed, it's unlikely they'd eat us like our cats and dogs would. Perhaps they'll invent secret languages like the whales or become sociable killers like the great white sharks.

You see bug murder scenes in microscopic detail and read about eagles attacking paragliders and you wonder if animals are enough to worry about. But then the cute videos pop up. Who's more adorable: the baby sloth, the sneezing panda, or the hamster spinning in his wheel like a mindless robot?

Picasso said computers are useless because they only give you answers. Now that evolution is getting faster, with the age of organic computing upon us, how long til we meet adorable machines that can think, even love?

After all, they already know how to make us mildly insane.