Robots as the good guys

Why is it that evil robots are more prevalent in entertainment? R2-D2, Autobots and Johnny 5 are the only blatantly heroic ones I can think of. In modern American science fiction movies, robots are all going to kill us, for some odd reason. The realistic robots in Iron Man that have weird quirks and dog-like intelligence are the best treatment robots have gotten in a while.

Now, maybe I am being unfair, but Terminator, The Matrix, the horrible "I, Robot" movie adaptation, Cylons, Star Wars battledroids, and their assorted rip-offs have painted robots as psychotic killing machines. Somehow, artificial intelligence always decides to emulate Stalin, and commit mass genocide. What is cold, calculating, and logical about genocide? In reality, genocide is usually very emotional, and ridiculous. It seems kinda desperate to portray robots as having such a human failing.

Now, too be fair, I have no idea how AIs will turn out. True AI requires emotions to prioritize behavior, so perhaps they get mental disorders. But unless the makers are very sloppy, that should be kept to a minimum. Perhaps you can't program human level reasoning, so they make logical leaps and get to weird results. But I guess that wouldn't be exciting enough. It might be that humans want to see themselves triumphing over machines, and thats fair, but I wish we'd have more good robots in entertainment.

Enter the MULE. A unmanned ground vehicle designed to assist ground troops, this next gen weapon system has no AI as of yet, but one day it might. This will terrify some people, but I think it should be given a chance. Sadly, people have been so programmed to fear robots with guns, it might never get the chance to fight terrorism and save soldiers lives. But I don't think it would randomly decide to kill us all. I would like to see a similar robot in a scifi movie, and I hope the evil robot stage will pass. Transformers, for all its faults, has made money on good robots, so I hope more follow suite.