What do you want in 2009 and the next four years?

(Excerpt from "Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight")

Imagine reading this in a history book:
About 120 years ago, spaceships discreetly appeared over cities around the united states and disgorged robotic machines to mingle among the humans and convert human life into sustenance for the robots themselves. While these machines are not alive and don’t breathe, eat, reproduce, or die, in 1886 the United States Supreme court- operating outside the boundaries of normal court procedures and without ever issuing a formal written opinion- altered the law of the land to recognize them as “humans” with all the rights of a human citizen. Actually, they gained more than all the rights of an American citizen, because the robots could live for hundreds of years, and if they broke laws or caused the death of real humans – even intentionally – they couldn’t be put in jail or executed. (technically it was possible that their operation could be terminated, but that had only happened a handful of times in over a hundred years and in each case they simply reinvented themselves.)
These robots began a systematic enslavement of humans and the Earth.

First, they approached the humans with a Faustian deal: give us your life and your loyalty, and we’ll give you safety, security and entertainment. At first, many of the humans refused, preferring instead to start their own family-owned or small, local business or operate family-owned farms. Over a 150-year period, the robots used their economic and political power to systematically destroy those businesses through a process the robots euphemistically called competition, and by the twenty-first century more than two-thirds of American workers depended on the robots or the government the robots had come to control for their security, health, and lifestyle.
The robots learned from watching the ancient Romans that “bread and circus” were essential to keeping people from becoming resentful of oppressors: so long as humans were well fed and entertained adequately, they’d submit to increasingly draconian intrusions into their private lives. Thus, the robots began to supply food and entertainment to the humans of the world.
And it goes on….