Excellent, thoughtful response brother. Yes, I am looking ahead too, I feel the same degree of value and attraction to sex dolls that I do to sex robots and all out robotic companions. These things should be discussed sooner than later on a wide scale, well before sex/companion robots become common place. How people treat their dolls now will translate over to robots if standards of treatment are not established well before then.
It is important. I do understand the concerns of some.
Reality is not every intelligent set of entities are going to have the same agenda. So naturally there is concern of eradication or enslavement of our own species by another. Then the other issue is whether or a machine is a being, to which I side on yes once it it hits a point. But I do definitely understand the concerns of the first half. It wouldn't be cool to craft our annihilation... it could be a good thing for earth, or it may not. The human race is a virus, a cancer. It has done absolutely nothing good for the planet, literally nothing. At its best there is damage control. We tore a damn whole in the ozone..........that's only the beginning.
But I think the key thing is how robots are programmed and how they are treated early on. Something that is more passive in its approach is good and all but on the flip side, if you are nothing but cruel and threatening, eventually some "bug" if you want to call it would crop up to where it realizes it needs to do something to survive.
Other issues are their strength, intelligence, and our reliance. Sooo like you wouldn't want to make an enemy of something that is so heavily integrated in our mainframes, physically superior, intelligent, and has the ability to be extremely resourceful in the form of self improvement and self repair.
So I doubt isolation is the way to go either. You'd need a good home for like the first, 2nd, etc etc n the line. The goal is you want them to fit into society. Then you treat them as if they belong in society. Equals but with different needs. No different than a Man vs a Woman. Equal but different needs. If it has the ability to learn on its own, this is critical. It needs to learn how to properly fit in. If it does not fit in, thus where your problems are going to naturally occur all on its own eventually the more sophisticated they get. It isn't so much a Nurture vs Nature, it is Nature and Nurture. If you want to create a sentient being it needs to shown what you perceive to be right and wrong as if it was applied to yourself. Otherwise it is going to be shown wrong. Does this make sense?
Why is this so important? You don't want something that can be remotely controlled either. If it can be remotely controlled it can be hacked much more easily than having to be able to manually over-rided.
You need to consider as a person or something that will at the very least respond logically to overcome its problem.
From this the issue is people now and how they treat them. You will want to start with production of a few. They have to be introduced in good environments/good homes. You slowly ramp up. The goal is to get people used to these "things" before they consider them as normal and can treat them correctly. Obviously some won't. You would need a new department. Almost like their own personal police depot. They are able to trigger 1 of 2 distress alarm. One for itself and one if a person is in danger. Lets face it, there are going to be people that try to destroy them or torment them and that shit needs to be monitored heavily and needs interference ran especially the higher the machine. The reason why you have your own dedicated department is because the police force is going to have a lot of biased and unbiased people. You want to minimize contact from biased individuals.
Again this all has to do with the nurture aspect. Obviously programming is just as critical but so is what you/their environment teach them both directly and indirectly.
Ideally to me every machine would be taught extensively. Somethings through download and others through careful interactions and what not. If you look at Data from star trek for instance. He learns very important things through talking with others and specific interactions. Yes you cannot prepare them for all interactions but you can teach them a great deal about people, humanity, ethics, and many other things.
Realistically it won't happen.The goal would be to pump them out fast, and THAT is a big issue. Wanting results now, money now. It opens up to too many problems across too many "units"
You could probably write books and books on this but that's just a start. If you want something that is highly intelligent you must take precautions. You must be thorough and you must not take shortcuts. Very meticulous planning should be in order and lots of back up plans. While yes androids are pretty cool and could be great. A lot can go wrong very fast. Obviously if you never build anything with the ability to learn then its not a problem but you are, so you need to take responsibility for it. You want to create beings that live With you and Help you. Not ones that destroy you or enslave you because of your ineptitude at one or more steps of the way in their creation.' This kind of talk could have its own forum to be honest that delves in different aspects from Programming, robotics, humanity, localization , etc etc etc etc etc. Its something that is pretty cool but hopefully it is a long ways away because the time I think it properly needs would be much greater than my life time. Again we are talking about an intelligent lifeform that is not bound in the same ways that we are.
And to throw this in because I don't feel like adding it in properly. You need to tour them around and station one in many many places of the world. You have to get people used to them. Slowly introduce more. The goal is for people to not create a war against them when it could be easily avoided by simply not creating an issue between man and machine. You need to not just educate the machines but the people as well. It is truly tremendous effort. xD I just want to keep going like into stuff about the security of the departments you'd use to help and detain them but I'll stop here or else I'll definitely exceed this site's word count many times over.