I think it's kind of nihilistic to say that robots will enevitably deem humans as inefficient and wasteful due to our emotional nature... If you're saying that robots are going to evolve intellect, then surely you should admit that a major behavioral feature of a species (in this case, emotions) probably has evolutionary utility. Outside of the Star Trek universe, it's yet to be determined if emotion is truly a detriment to productive reasoning; I would be willing to be that there is no strong evidence to show that human-scale intellect can be accomplished without behavioral quirks such as emotions.
Nevertheless, I would say it's entirely reasonable to tackle this question now. We really don't know enough about cognition or the information-processing capabilities of modern computers to say that an intelligent machine won't happen. Already, self-replicating computer programs in the form of viruses and other malware are churning out thousands of new copies of themselves every day over the internet, and although error-checking in modern computers is probably a little better than that of DNA, it's plausible (although not likely) that some of these malicious executables might mutate and eventually come to evolve without the assistance of human tinkerers. More importantly, we do have tinkerers working on artificial intelligence and other fields of adaptive computing, and so it's not really just a matter of chance; the military is sponsoring research in intelligent autonomous vehicles and artillery, private sectors are researching algorithms that automatically reprogram themselves to predict flows in the stock market, and the academic sector is working on all sorts of projects in between. Even if it is a long shot, we should take responsibility and think about these issues before things get complicated. What if civil liberties and civil rights had happened before Europe took up the mass practice of indentured servitude? We have a chance to avoid what could be a very dangerous situation, so even if it seems a little silly and make believe, I think we owe it to ourselves to look ahead. We've already learned this type of lesson before.
~Joe