Cynthia Breazeal — American Scientist born on November 15, 1967,

Cynthia Lynn Breazeal is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is the director of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Laboratory. She is best known for her work in robotics where she is recognized as a pioneer of social robotics and human–robot interaction... (wikipedia)

In a lot of Western science fiction, you need some form of conflict, whether it's aliens or robots. I think in Western culture, being more suspicious of science, and hubris, you'll see a lot of fear of creating something that goes out of control.
If you look at the field of robotics today, you can say robots have been in the deepest oceans, they've been to Mars, you know? They've been all these places, but they're just now starting to come into your living room. Your living room is the final frontier for robots.
Through our evolution, we're so specialized for social interaction. So, if you can really design robots that can interact with people, in this very natural, interpersonal way, I think that would be great. You wouldn't have to have people read manuals, in order to operate them.
I do think, in time, people will have, sort of, relationships with certain kinds of robots - not every robot, but certain kinds of robots - where they might feel that it is a sort of friendship, but it's going to be of a robot-human kind.
I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me.