What does it mean for humanity when a robot can beat us at Rock, Paper, Scissors?

Okay, first of all watch the video below and then carry on.

The video itself isn't that exciting but the actual technology that has gone into building this robot and the possibilities something like this has now opened for mankind could change everything. Well not everything, but a lot of things.

If you didn't see in the video I'll just give a quick explanation of how it works. Basically the robot has a tiny camera that can detect the tiniest movement on the hand in a millisecond. So by the time you've started moving your hand into the position this robot already knows what you have chosen because it has detected a tiny movement in your hand.

The technology, at the moment, is at quite a basic level in terms of what it can actually do. Yes, it is impressive that it can beat you at a game of rock, paper, scissors but then that is only a choice of three different hand movements and even then it's only really two because you don't have to move your hand from it's original position if you are playing Rock.

But what it does represent is a robot being able to tell what a human being is going to do before they have the chance to complete the action, and create some way of stopping it. So, in the case of this video all we see is that the robot is able to beat the man at a game of rock, paper, scissors, but what if we start to think about where else this could be applied?

If you've seen the film Robocop then you'll have probably jumped to the same first idea I had which is robot police able to tell when someone is about to pull a weapon and they are able to react first and prevent it from happening. Up until now all the stuff like that just seemed like make believe but something like this shows that we are making real strides and it isn't long before T-800s are travelling back to the 80's to assassinate ladies, with really bad hair, whose offspring will one day destroy Skynet.

It could be used in for lots of different uses. With every knew technology it's not long before someone finds a way of selling it as a sex object. I mean is it really that far off engineers being able to build full size robots that can react to even more things? Say a full size robot is able to see when someone is about to trip and they are able to reach and catch them. That would be the first step, right? Well it wouldn't take long for someone to make the leap into the sexual. For example a robot you could have sex with and it would able to tell when ou are about to come and get off so you could... deposit somewhere else. Apologies if I got a bit graphic there but I really couldn't think of a better example. It does get you thinking though, with this leap how long will it be before we are able to build robots with complete personalities of their own and able to act of their own free will?

I'm not saying we should all be investing in as many tinned goods as we can and digging ourselves a bomb shelter in the back garden, all I'm saying is we need to be careful because before we know it we COULD be spelling our own destruction. If you're going to work on some form of sci-fi movie technology from the 80's instead of looking at the The Terminator and Robocop and building robots look at Star Wars and build us a lightsabre please. I'm only suggesting lightsabre's next because I assume they've already figured out and started production on hover-boards so that they're available by October 21st, 2015 (also my 24 Birthday *HINT*)

One final thought; what if two of these robots played each other?