This is John Batchel, a conversation with my colleague Chris Regal of Scala.com for the Scholar Report on

the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year. The theme is bots, bots everywhere,

robots, cute bots, doggy watt bots, flying bots. Chris characterizes what he's seeing and what the developments look like and where

we're going, at least a hint of where we're going, not just toys, much more coming.

Later tonight, Chris explains at length.

So, John, you have the basic utilitarian robots that might fold your laundry or sweep your floors, but you're also seeing

advances in more advanced robotics that can replace human tasks. Would that be in assembly or

firefighting or other potentially either repetitive or dangerous tasks? But there is certainly

the continued merger between artificial intelligence as a capability

and the ability to learn tasks and execute tasks and the robotics as the execution arm.

So you're starting to see much, much more progressive marriage between those two disciplines

and how that could potentially change the economic future in the country.