The Robotic Intelligence

Today's Boing Boing newsletter highlighted an interesting suggestion about the sometimes called theme of "Rise of the Machines".
Boing Boing didn't supplied much information about it so I did a hyper-quick research myself.
In 1997 Hans Moracev , an Austrian born is a research professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, wrote a paper about artificial intelligence on the Journal of Evolution and Technology.

"When will computer hardware match the human brain" discusses about how the performance of AI machines tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. on extrapolation of past trends and on examination of technologies under development it estimates the processing power and memory capacity necessary to match general intellectual performance of the human brain. The conclusion of Moracev is that the required hardware to fulfill such purpose will be available in cheap machines in the 2020s.
Robotics and AI are two very interesting subjects which will have an increasing impact -much more than it's commonly thought- on our lives and our society. Considering the fast and steep improvement of the information technology in the last say 30-40 years and the magnitude of it in the everyday life -especially starting from the time the web began to interconnect with people lives- we can expect that advanced machines will modify the social life the way we know and live today. Machines working in the fields of house keeping, health-care, law enforcement, versatile low profile workers and (maybe) lovers, will be available to the consumer and industry.
Will it be a better world? I tend to say yes because I trust machines more than humans, but will the "rise of the machines" be deprived of dangers? To this I'm a bit concerned. The lack of advance concepts in the legislation field could produce unclear and dangerous situation. We already see this with the Internet and the run for a last-minute legislation effort that, by trying to fix some already accustomed social behaviour (as the concept of a free web environment), produced aberrations like those to limit the file sharing and enforcing the people control by spy-like systems.