Depictions of the future in books and film are usually influenced by what's going on at the time, reflecting social malaise, impending armageddon, or economic anxieties. The robots in classic sci-fi usually resembled humans, as most authors assumed they would eventually assist us in the same tasks humans did.
Instead, however, today we find artificial intelligence doing some of our thinking for us, but it's more often solving problems that don't need intervention from self-contained humanoid robots.
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