Is it worth spending so much time on Robotics

Machines have been made by man to help him with almost all aspects of his life. Man can claim that all these robotics based science projects are helping him to get things done faster and more efficiently than before, but does all the help that man have improve the quality of his life?

Is it really worth spending the billions that get spent annually on robotics? Or are we just so busy developing new toys that we lose the focus on what is truly important. It is not denied that machines and robots have made it easier for us to do a number of tasks, but these were tasks we could do any way.

So by making the machines and robots work for us are we giving them the power to run our lives? So far there has not been developed successfully the kind of artificial intelligence that would be harmful to human beings. But just how soon will we have machines thinking and then what will happen when the machines realize that we the human creators are redundant?

In popular science fiction there is always the battle between man and machine looming large in the future. Perhaps if we choose to develop the right sort of machines it would be possible to skip that battle altogether. Maybe we can work out the probability of keeping machines and robots from fighting the war against humans in a science project.