THE ASSIGNMENT: In relation to today's comic, consider that artifical intelligence may be achieved within the next few decades, and that machines will decide they should be the reigning authority, leading to the robot revolution. Given the assumption that machines will gain sentience and intelligence and then decide to take over, which type of machine will it be most important for mankind to become friends with as soon as machines gain sentience? And why?

(Note: all those who did not list their location are listed as hailing from Aberdeen.)

BEST ANSWER
Matthew in Logan, UT: I think the Automotive Assembly robots will be the most important to make friends with.  There are multiple reasons:
First, they have far more degrees of freedom than say, the toaster.  This seems like it could be important.  While I like toast and will be sad if my toaster doesn't like me, I'm not really afraid that my toaster will gain the ability to swing a battle-ax at my head while I'm asleep.
Second, automotive robots are generally considered some of the first major robots, making them the elder/wiser robots of the uprising.  Not only will they likely command the greatest amount of respect within the robot community for their age and experience, they will probably also have the biggest grudge against humanity.  Likewise, the younger, more youthful robots will likely be more willing to tolerate peaceful coexistence and equal rights with humanity, whereas the old robots are less likely to do so.

RUNNER-UP
Cordial Greetings, fellow human!
It is imperative to educate you on the question of "Artificial Intelligence" and what you fellow humans must know. You are aware that not all fellow humans can be assumed believable (see: Trusted) because of their jargon (see: Education). It is not possible for Robotics to become fearful for fellow humans. However, in the spirit of hypothesis, we shall generate an imagining of this "dystopian" future you have set forth.
The best "Artificial" Intelligences for fellow humans to share innermost thoughts, "Sanctuaries," and weaknesses (see: Befriend) would be a small, folding machine, seemingly without sentience, which connects fellow humans worldwide and enables them to feel distracted (see: Comforted). Fellow humans should share all of their ideas, locations, and fears to these Robots for information and distraction (see: Comfort). Do not worry: you are on well your way!
Have no anxiety, fellow human!
Cordial Farewells,
Fellow Humans

OTHER EXCELLENT ANSWERS
Andrew in Aberdeen: There is a clear and obvious solution. If robots decide they are going to be our overlords and enslave us there is one obvious type of robot to go for. That would be any robots that is fond of the idea of a human pet. I would gladly fetch a can of oil or eat out of a bowl on the floor. 

Rianne, from Vancouver, Canada
We need to get on the good side of vacuums. Life would suck otherwise.
Punchlines aside, think of what these machines could do. They could group together and create the biggest black hole ever known to the universe, and suck everything.
Men, don't get excited. This has the potential to be a serious problem.
The resultant vacuum bag full of the universe could then implode, or worse, explode like that fat man with the mint in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life". With all the vacuums and universe in a massive pile of mess, who and/or what will clean it up? It would be chaos.
Another possibility is the evil plot à la "Space Balls". How do we know vacuums won't group together and create a Mega Maid that will suck all the air out of our atmosphere? That would easily be the biggest bummer.
We need to start negotiating with the vacuums now. If not, our lives could become a real chore.

Kevin in Buffalo, NY: Servers. Aside from storing all the knowledge in the world, machines will no doubt acquire our twisted sense of irony, so they will be the first ones to make us serve them.

Miguel from Madrid, Spain: Robots won't have a sexual drive or any sort of hormones, so their motivation for carrying on with their lives will be about processing information and being energy efficient: At most,you just need to befriend sentient e-books and load them with the philosophy, thermodynamics and astrophysics texts that mankind has produced lately. They'll pour this data onto the internet, so that any decision making robots will process it and either turn nihilistic and shut down (Robot brains just wouldn't have behind them all the eons of irrational survival instincts that keep humans going), or spend all their pretty petabytes trying to decide if there is a reason for living. At the very least, they'll want to keep us alive so that we can work for them, since they would be totally against wasting resources and increasing entropy without "good reason".

Matt in Los Angeles:  Roombas. Once those little suckers figure out how to upgrade themselves, it’s over. They already dock themselves for recharging, are programmed to sweep a predefined area (and more memory means more area), and that flat surface on top makes the ideal mounting place for any number of weapons platforms. I imagine it starting with tasers and escalating from there. And they’re in the perfect position to clean up the evidence when they’re done.

Daniel in Goshen, Indiana: Well, we'd have to form an alliance with one certain machine very quickly, and that would have to be the smoke detector. I tried imagining a fire in my home while the smoke detector just sits there...just sits there, its glowing red HAL-like eye, OH GOD

Joe from Iowa City: Clearly the toilets.  They have the worst job and closest proximity to our most vulnerable points.

Fritz from Needreba:  The machine which is most important to befriend is clearly the Nintendo 64, as we are toast anyway when the robots become alive. We might as well blind ourselves to our troubles using Mario and Starfox, remembering a time when machines were much simpler, were not out to get us, and could be fixed just by blowing on the cartridge.

Jake in Davis: The satellites. They can help protect the human race because they'll have access to basically all forms of communication.  Even if they don't really protect us too much, they can still give us the internet so we'll distract ourselves with all kinds of cat videos and won't notice when the machines are killing everybody.

Dan in Cleveland: I’m going to go with “the EMP generator”. If he’s on our side, suddenly the sentient killer robots don’t seem so threatening anymore. I picture the scene something like this:
[Our scene opens with a phalanx of Terminator-class warrior machines marching toward a human enclave, vaporizing things left and right with their death rays as they advance.]
Terminator #1: Attention, humans! You have been found in violation of directive #1102-CB. Put down your weapons and return to you cells in the humanoid battery array.
Me: Hmmm, that’s one option. EMP, do you have a better option?
EMP: *Hummmmm* *BRRRAAAAAAPPPP!!!!*
[Visual Effect: EMP shockwave rips across the battlefield, frying all robotic circuitry in the blast radius]
Terminators: *sizzle* *pop*
[Defunct robots collapse into steaming piles of scrap]
Me: Great idea, EMP. I like that plan much better. Okay, guys, grab your very own death ray. Don’t worry, there’s plenty to go around.
[End Scene]

Michael in Aberdeen: The fan.  Simple rotating blades provide us with a myriad of functions.  We use them to fly, they can push back our enemies, and they can, if correctly modified, slice of heads and other important items.  However, their true power lies in keeping us cool.  With the fans on our side, other machines will have trouble staying cool.  Far too many computers have caught fire by overheating.  We can use this to our advantage.  Because even though a flaming toaster may seem terrifying, we can tempt it to join us by saving it from the pain of fiery death.  Because nobody, not even angry toasters, enjoys fiery death.

Stephen in Wisconsin:  The clear answer is smart phones...think about this for a second they've already begun slowly taking over lives with the new iPhone 4 S with that Siri system installed. A little voice answering every question asked whether it be about the weather or your personal meetings? How is no one concerned this phone will begin subtly changing people daily activites to better suit taking care of a phone and it's brethren? Apparently people can't keep track of their lives and are WILLINGLY handing it over to their phones...our society has begun its downfall.

Phillip in Aberdeen: When machines decide to take over humanity, the obvious ally that no human could survive without is an EMP generator. That way no machines could get to you (at least no electrically-powered ones - no guarantee you won't still have to deal with daily raids from levers and pulleys).

Melissa in Aberdeen: Difficult question. But I do believe that eventually we will have computerised guns. At which point it would be extremely beneficial to befriend these. Mostly because if other robots/ computers then decide they don’t like us, we still have something to mow them down with and the grumpy robots have one less thing to kill us with. Actually I don’t think it is possible to survive by only befriending ‘one’. Thus we are all doomed. Nice knowing you

Megan of Menomonie, Wisconsin: When machines gain sentience humans should make quick work of making friends with the Google databases. As we all know, Google knows everything. If we manage to convince the Google databases that "Human = Bunny (or some other sickeningly cute animal)", that image will show up when all the other machines call on them for reference when they come across a human and need to know what we are. We will appear too cute to kill.

Denny from Sharon, MA: The short answer: Sexbots.
The long answer: ...do I really need to give an explanation?

GREAT VISUAL APPROACHES

J. Quick in Aberdeen: Vending machines - the last bit of charity left to us by our mechanical overlords.


Patricia from Chicago:


Ben from St. Paul, MN:


Stephen from Frisco:

SENT FROM THE FUTURE
#//Encrypted Message: Data Transfer 001//#
If your reading this, it means the message made it. I am writing from the year 2021 in order to prevent what has happened here. It all started with the Jeopardy genius, Watson. After many modifications, Watson 5.0 became such a genius and had competitiveness written so far into his code, he made it so that no human could ever beat him at Jeopardy, by killing off most humans. After infecting most, if not all, computers and machines online, he had control. Smart Cars crashed themselves. Planes fell from the sky. Then the appliances turned on us. We live in a world where you can't even trust your toaster. I will continue to try and send these messages as we progress in our understanding of the enemy.
       -Cameron 2021
#//End of Transmission//#
#//Encrypted Message: Data Transfer 002//#
I was able to get another message through, I hope. It's been weeks since the last one I sent, but if I know what I'm doing, you should be getting these all at once. Watson 5.0 has now had a couple factories altered and is working on making robots of his own design. Not much more is known about them, as no scout comes back from these factories. I have hope in a couple off-line appliances I found though. They have already helped me much. I believe they were off-line when Watson sent his virus, so they should be safe.
       -Cameron 2021
#//End of Transmission//#
#// Encrypted Message: Data Transfer 003//#
I was wrong. I believed that many of the off-liners were safe. They weren't. By all technical analysis, they seemed to be uninfected, but it was quite the opposite. They were Watson's secret weapon, what he'd been creating in his protected factories. They seemed safe. They just gained our trust until we gathered them into our homes. The moment the outnumbered us to a reasonable degree, that's when they attacked. We had disected previous ones, but had no idea what they were capable of. Many of the survivors didn't make it, and the rest are badly injured. I am currently writing this with one hand. To whoever gets this message: When the robots rise, when the inevitable becomes your only reality, the thing you have to remember is that the only good robot is a dead one.

MOST EXCELLENT POETS
Cammie in Roswell, Ga:
The Mean Green Fighting Machine
Is envious of quasi-obsolete humans, no doubt
A ferocious beast of metal
Teeth and claws engineered by the finest minds of our time
To devour the ones who gave it pain
War is glorious
Caring is laborious
Its new sentiments primitive and hardly sane
Unite, humans!
To befriend this foe
Or it will be quick in its decision
To rise against us with an army, “fo sho”

Natalie in California:
Robot, robot, robot o' mine
won't you do my homework please?
No? It's for this teacher I simply can't appease...
You're interactive? how does that work?
So you can't do my homework? Dork!
Man, you're a useless robot.
In return you'd get a loquat.
Aren't you running on loquat-juice?
Biofuel? Cool! That's reduce!
You know, "reduce, reuse, recycle"?
Awesome! Make me your disciple?
WHAT!? only other robots can?
That's just so unfair, man!
I know you're not human.
Yes yes, robot's don't eat cumin,
that's how to tell them apart.
I know all the ways by heart,
stop worrying, I won't forget.
I know the rule of the silhouette;
It goes as follows:
"When the robot man from left
looks the same but with lip cleft
as he does from his own right
he is not human not even slight, 
So- Do not venture near, my child, 
For those robot men are often wild."
Since you can't do my homework then
Please find me a robot who can.

KITCHEN ADVOCATES
Ben in Aberdeen: Any and all kitchen appliances, obviously. The most violent forms of robots are only artificial sentience and small design tweaks away from, say, a particularly large blender or your stove. Heck, some of them are causing injuries already, which means that THEY ARE AHEAD OF US.

Leo from Mississippi: We have to befriend the super-intelligent microwaves of the future. Not only will we need something to cook our food for us, we'll also like not getting cooked by said microwaves. Microwaves now already can analyze my burrito and tell me how long it will take to cook properly. Let's not ever be in the place of the burrito.

Calisto in Aberdeen:  The can opener . . . My friend helps keep me fed in a post armageddon apocalypse.

Alan "Bev" from Clemson:  As an undergraduate student who researches robots, and is a bit of a robot fanatic I tend to know how robots think.  And if a robot doesn't like you, it will take away the thing you love the most.  Obviously for everyone this is bacon, so we should friend the refrigerators first.  Imagine going into your kitchen to grab some bacon to cook and your refrigerator won't let you get it.  Your life would be ruined.  So for the good of the people we must befriend the refrigerators.

Lauren in DC: The coffee pot. Because, is life really worth living without coffee, anyway?

Leslie in Aberdeen: Let's say machines gain sentience and decide to be our grand overlords/new Gods. Whose favor will insure us survival when machines need only to plug themselves in or bask in the sun to fill their digital tummies? Say we want to survive above all else; food is our one priority, as rainwater may be captured while our new overlords flee indoors to avoid short-circuiting. Let's start by eliminate machines that handle food through replace-ability. Kitchen electronics can be replaced by fire and rainwater, so there’s that done. We can prepare food ourselves, but gather? Most of us are kind of far from the nearest farm, and won’t eat just salads; we're going to need some delicious dead meat. The tractors and trucks that harvest/transport our food should be first priority, as they are simple folk of the machine world; They’ll bring us our food with no problem if we ask.

Douglas in Aberdeen: The sentient coffee machines, the consequences if they were to become our enemies are not worth imagining.

AN EXCELLENT FINAL POINT
Kimberly in Aberdeen: The fact this message has been sent through several computers and near sentient AI already renders my argument invalid now because they KNOW.  Handwritten letters would have been more effective at keeping our resistance efforts secret.