One discussion I often find myself getting into with people when I start talking about robotic actors is what exactly do you mean by robot. Does it just have to look like a robot, (and what is that) or does it have to meet some semantic
or technical definition of robot.

I really don't have an answer accept how I feel about it, which is that a robot is a mechanical object that take a series of tasks without direct human intervention.

I feel there are still problems with that definition, but it works for me, although I keep ending up in arguments about weather my coffee pot and washing machine are robots.
So here I have started exploring the idea as a mind map, which unfortunately does not seem to fit very well int he blog.