Interesting articlde, but robots should not be feared, nor viewed as a life form. Technology is many decades away from being able to produce truely autonomous robots with 'adaptive intelligence', the ability to source and use a variety of durable, reliable, and continuously replensihable energy sources (food - for want of a better description), and to self replicate - by choice not program. For the foreseeable future robots will be nothing more than tools or toys, no matter what anthropomorhic apearance they may have. As for a soul - that is something still well beyond our understanding......

Nothing interesting about the article, though here is a comment. Leave aside the "soul" and "no soul" debate - "soul" is the cause and effect of all things that happen around/to a human being, not possible with a robot. To produce a robotics artifact that parallels: 1. human body organization - Externally as well as Internally 2. human mind - Grows/Evolves with time in ways that doesn't require them to change into a different species, but changes the way the person handles the external sensory inputs, and internal mental inputs and responses. Thus, a person who would reject most of the useful advice being given to him by others, could easily, in 10-20 years give greatest heed to such advice. Similarly, one chooses to ignore the sound of loudspeaker, and focus on listening to the feeblest voice of an elderly old woman who doesn't know who she is addressing to. This involves , adaptive, discretionary, reactive, reasoning, memory, and so many other faculties of mind that a robot with a mind is impossible to create - ever. 3. Evolutionary intelligence - even the simplest one - i.e. to understand that a wheel is the best thing to use for movement, or that fire is the best thing that ever happened to human beings, or to fill a captcha - is an impossiblity for anybody working out there in the robotics technology lab. 4. For a practical example, take a look at the "Google search results", and the height of their irrelevant algorithms - they simply don't differentiate between good and bad content pages - they simply don't know the intent of the user from the query, because query languages are not the way mind works. 5. Anyways, take time, a billion years, say, and we will see if such a robot can be imagined, let alone created.