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In a Techonomy panel titled "Where's My Robot?" moderator John Markoff of The New York Times started by suggesting that a better question might be "Where isn't my robot?" In this session, Rodney Brooks of Rethink Robotics talked about the next generation of robotics, while MIT's Andrew McAfee discussed worries that robotics would take jobs from people.

Markoff noted that Google's self-driving car has already gone 300,000 miles, Volvo has said it will have a driverless car in the market by 2014, robots in the form of drones are in the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan, and robots are used routinely in surgery. He's seen a variety of "lights-out"...