If you're still learning and experimenting with hobby robots and recycling parts to make other robots and things that's fine and you should continue doing that.
But for everyone else (like the guy building Super-droid bot Anna), your robot will probably be around long after you are. 100 years from now, robot technology would have advance to make our stuff something akin to "folk art." And that could be pretty cool because they might be collectable and preserved. (Museums have been preserving autonotoms from the middle ages)
But unlike the guys in the middle ages, we have an opportunity to program our bots to deliver messages to their new owners or play voice clips of ourselves after a certain date or after not recognizing your face or voice for at least 20 years.
"Excuse me. I haven't seen my creator's face in over 129 years. I assume he's dead. I have a message he wanted me to give to my new owners. Do you want to hear it now or we can do this the next time I'm turned on?"
Its a huge untapped area, but some companies are preparing for it and staking out territory.
For a while I was working on an idea to let robots remember thoughts, stories, opinions, advice, messages, audio and video clips, etc. from a person. The idea was that these “memories” could then be delivered to other people (friends, family, decendents, etc), with permission, before or after the person has died.
Imagine a robot telling you “Your grandfather would have said to save and invest that money in a house instead of blowing it on a ring.” … “But ironically, he didn’t follow his own advice.” …“Your grandmother would have disagreed.” It could also be a way of kids asking a parent’s advice on something indirectly without revealing to the parent that the topic is even being thought about.
The whole area of “Talking to your ancestors or descendents” turned into too big of a thing and more of an internet service or phone app than a robot. I decided to focus on smaller and more robot related goals. I also noticed that Google filed some patents that were closely related.
I was thinking more like “I had a lot of fun making my robot, it made a lot of people smile. You should make something and share it with others too.” And before cell phones, I had the idea of a bullentin board function on a house robot; where a husband can leave a message on it for his wife and the next time the robot detects his wife, it could play it for her.
But, giving a robot advice and having it share it with others is damn interesting. There could be family robot servants passed on from generation to generation, knowing all the family secrets and consulted with, especially if one of it’s owners was a wiz at the stockmarket or something.
