Annual UN robot census

Oddly, this year's United Nations annual robot census doesn't seem to have generated any real press attention - which is a shame, because as Clive Thomson says (CollisionDetection) "words fail to describe my unbridled delight that global civil servants spend their time collating this information".

Only three years ago, according to the UN, the global robot population (domestic use) was 607,000 machines (Wired). In last year's census (to end 2004) the figure had almost doubled to 1.2 million. To end 2005, the figure had grown to 1.9 million domestic robots plus another million in a seemingly new category of "entertainment and leisure" robots, for a total domestic robot population of around 2.9 million. That's more domestic robots on earth than Mongolians, apparently (though Mongolia is a pretty empty place - it has almost thirteen times as much land area per person that neighbouring China, a problem for another day). I get something of a wonderfully Gernsback-continuum, "we are living in the future" vibe from the fact that not only are there almost three million domestic robots on earth (and roughly doubling every year) but the UN takes an annual census of them.