10 Most Scarily Advanced Robots In The World

3. Pepper

Moving away now from all-terrain superbots and creepy-crawly swarms, in favour of something a little more cuddly.

Pepper, by Aldebaran, is billed as the first ever emotional robot. Designed purely for human interaction, Pepper not only picks up your vocal commands, but your tonal cues and even your body language in order to gauge your mood.

Everything that each Pepper robot learns is uploaded to the cloud and shared with the other Peppers in order to create a massive bank of emotional data.

The development of emotional AI has begun to throw up all kinds of dilemmas that most people probably would think we would have to deal with in this day and age. Apparently, Pepper's terms of ownership state that to use Pepper for any kind of sexual or indecent purposes is not allowed because of its status as an emotional robot.

This detail, although seemingly pretty minor, may be foreshadowing a massive moral debate that we're going to have to engage in pretty soon.

If Pepper's emotional needs are being protected, does that mean that this robot has rights? At what point do we grant those rights to robots and should they have any others? Then you have to ask where we draw the line, would it even be wrong to "own" another emotional being?

Sounds like science fiction, but it's a debate we're already having with Pepper.