How it all started and what is it now.

ROBOTS

It's basically amazing seeing how machines created by humans can now
talk like we do, and understand better.

In the context of "The 21st century" robots are no longer the wanders. People back then might have imagined something like this but people now have no extend to impossibility.

The evolution of robots had been started nearly from the fifth century Archytas of Tarentum, a pal of Plato’s, built a mechanical bird driven by a jet of steam or compressed air—arguably history’s first robot—in the fifth century B.C.
Everything started from the 1960's. There were plenty industrial robots digitally controlled capable of manufacturing tasks and also making the use of artificial intelligence.  More than a million industrial robots are now in use, nearly half of them are made in Japan. Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for an armored humanoid machine in 1495. Engineer Mark Rosheim has created a functional miniature version for NASA to help colonize Mars.
Elektro, the world’s first humanoid robot, debuted in 1939. Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine“spoke” more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation. Hans Moravec, founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, predicts that robots will emerge as their own species by 2040. “They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle,operate our society increasingly well without us,” he concludes, oddly cheery.
Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years. The smallest robot is called a nanobot. It is less than one-thousandth of a millimeter. Japan's NES System Technologies recently built a winebot, capable of identifying many different types of wines and cheeses. It made a mistake at one point and named a reporter's hand as prosciutto.

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