Artificial Intelligence would be quite interesting (but not exactly possible in this century) since it would ease quite a few problems relating to humans and their limitations.

They'd be more useful engineers (albeit more limited in aspect of tasks they can accomplish unless we manage to construct highly advanced robots) since human error (and indeed, almost all error) would be eliminated, allowing extremely precise calculations. They could also be placed to do certain tasks that may have been quite well impossible to accomplish with humans. Robots, as stated by the previous poster(s), does not require to bypass barriers such as proper nourishment (although proper maintainence would be required, not to the degree of daily care though) and possibly less costly.

On the other hand though, it would be strange to find pieces of metal doing all work for you, in fact, it would be quite unnerving if I were in that position.

AI is inevitable. If we don't give it 'emotions' it will experience no evil motivations like humans. No hate, no fear, no distrust. Just supercomputing calculators.
Movies give AI evil human characteristics. It would not occur to AI to exterminate humans. Killing is what humans do. We are irrational little monkeys. AI will be superior and without ego.

I saw a video in discovery in which a scientist was about 1 year away from mapping a brain in a room full of computers. In the video the scientist said that in this century we would be able to create self thinking robots who would be capable of crushing us like bugs if they wanted to. One of the most interesting parts of that video was how another scientist was able to read a monkeys thoughts through a machine he had built. He had the monkey playing a computer game, while his machine was reading the monkeys thoughts and moving a robotic arm simultaneously. The interesting thing here was when the monkey discovered he could play the game without controlling the joystick anymore... He discovered that he could play it with his thoughts..... Lazy Monkey....