Exposure and education increasingly need to happen earlier and go further. This building of the pipeline and education of leaders of tomorrow are at least as important as the technology itself. A new technology, like robotics, is an area where there is often a great advantage to being young, enthusiastic and ready to learn. In the first arena are operations that are in hazardous places where people don't or can't go. Examples of these robots are Sojourner on Mars, the subsea robots used to explore the Titanic, and the accident-response robots at Three Mile and Chernobyl.
Robots are explorers and remote agents to machines that expand our experience.
Another important agenda is to search for new life forms. Robots will also transform the way we deal with disasters, from earthquakes to warfare. These are our agents of productivity. They can do it differently, better, more cheaply and at a higher quality. We haven't begun to see what they will do for us, other than what their physical capabilities are.