10 Ways Robots Will Change All Our Lives Forever

2. Immortality?

As well as driving our cars and cooking our dinner, could robots be the answer in our quest for immortality?

Russian entrepreneur, Dmitry Itskov, thinks so. Itskov has set up a not-for-profit organisation known as the 2045 Initiative and focusses on providing an international centre of research into the possibility of extending the human life through robotics, perhaps even to the point of transferring our human consciousness into robotic avatars.

Whilst this feels like a far distant bit of science fiction, Dmitry is entirely sincere in his belief that this could be a reality in the future. Whilst it's a big leap from telepresence devices to avatars, the basic notion of experiencing the world through a robot is shared between the two concepts.

In the nearer future, robotics can be used in the potentially indefinite extension of human life through the use of bionic implants. We already use pacemakers, robotic prosthetic limbs and neural implants, not to mention life support systems such as respirators in every one of our hospitals

So you could say that we're pretty much halfway there when it comes to robotic immortality.