Personal Robot is our new favourite armless automated assistant...

She's armless, but is she 'armless?

The name isn't exactly catchy, and yes there's some basic design cues taken from the conference screens in Demolition Man, but don't judge this robot by its... chassis

With just seven days to go, Personal Robot is well passed its $50,000 funding target, and has already amassed a grand total of $136,000.

Here's what the beginning of the pitch looks like.

She's the whole package? That's a little objectifying isn't it? If this was a real AI, we expect she wouldn't respond too well to that, you could kick off a whole AI feminist apocalypse. Now there's something to be worried about. Just let us have an alternate face that looks like Bryan Ferry and this can all go away.

Anyway. Get past the initial weirdness and this actually looks kind of sort of interesting. Personal Robot can recognise faces, objects and even emotions, and keeps track of all of that. So basically, it knows which members of the family are grumpy and which are overly cheerful, and resents you all equally.

It can also allegedly hold a conversation with you, which is impressive enough in itself given how hit and miss voice-recognition tech still is. Like the conference screens in Demolition Man, it can roll around but no-one has explained yet how it takes on a flight of stairs without a helping hand from Stannah.

On top of all of this, it's a thoroughly functional and adaptable home automation system. Personal Robot patrols your house (the bottom half at least) whilst you're away, piping live video feed through to your phone, as well as managing the heating, motion sensors and the like. It can adjust your lighting to save money, or make it look like someone is in the house. It'll even turn on the coffee machine for you in the morning, remind you of calendar appointments through the day, and handle video calls and photographs.

The potential for something like this is mind-boggling. Though this is extremely clever technology, we would not go so far as to call it artificial intelligence, as Robotbase has done. And thank god because, have you even seen Westworld?! Spoiler alert*, that AI thing doesn't go so well.

And if Personal Robot does pass the Turing Test and the robot apocalypse is nigh, you'll find us hiding upstairs.

*If you still haven't seen Westworld, we can't be blamed for this.