I'm going to assume that intelligent civilizations are much more rare than natural resources in the galaxy. Since intelligent civilizations probably develop in radically different ways, we would be far more valuable as objects of study than as a source of minerals. It would enhance the survival of a star spanning civilization to understand how other intelligent civilizations evolve.

Like you said, "everything is relative". For astronomers, two million years is a pretty short time. Unless you're waiting in the coffee line.

Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

~George Carlin

Great book.

The robot should give priority to its owner. If the robot has to consider all humans equal, it will have to deal with ambiguity and uncertain intention in the external environment, which can lead to some disturbing possibilities. Consider the possibility that a robot could be manipulated into committing murder by having two pedestrians step out in front of a car on a narrow bridge. The car has no choice but to turn off the bridge, because two people are worth more than one. Or turning away from pedestrians (who are more likely to die) and instead going into oncoming traffic (where the oncoming car may or may not even have a passenger, or it may be a school bus). By always maximizing the survival of the passenger, I suspect that overall deaths will be minimized.

The word "perfect" is meaningless outside of mathematics.

Agreed. I recommend it to all our new programmers.

Personally I like the idea that the underlying reality of the universe is random. I find the idea that the universe is a deterministic clockwork to be depressing. Of course, the universe is going to be whatever it is no matter what I think. Unless, of course, I'm the one who collapses the wave function.

I guess you're not a fan of the Copenhagen interpretation. From Wikipedia:

The Copenhagen interpretation - due largely to the Danish theoretical physicist Niels Bohr - remains the quantum mechanical formalism that is currently most widely accepted amongst physicists, some 75 years after its enunciation. According to this interpretation, the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is not a temporary feature which will eventually be replaced by a deterministic theory, but instead must be considered a final renunciation of the classical idea of "causality".

Now you've done it! Now we have to define "thinking". And thinking is required to define thinking. Or is it? Because I haven't defined thinking yet.

Oh yeah, and understand natural language commands and stream ultra high-def video.

I wear glasses, and if they suddenly had a HUD that was smart enough to keep out of my direct line of sight unless I wanted it, and if they had a camera and could understand some basic hand gestures from me, and make a virtual keyboard if necessary, and if they had headphones integrated into the part that rested on my ears, and if they were a smart phone and GPS and video camera and web browser, and if they didn't cost more than your average smart phone, and if they looked like normal glasses, I would be ok with that.

I want to do away with this base 10 nonsense and institute a base 12 numbering system. Try evenly dividing your primitive base 10 system into thirds!

It would make a great platform for space observatories. Imagine a grid of radio telescopes on the dark side. It would also probably be a good place for a gravity wave detector.

Just wait until the foreigners start building robots to immigrate into America for them. Then we'll be in trouble.