Why Do We Fear Robots?

Indeed, many of us love them and can't imagine our lives without them. The closer that robots get to a human or animal form, the more we begin to feel the mixture of fear and empathy that has defined our relationship with our fellow beings since we first began dragging our knuckles around millions of years ago. If we skew the design of these machines toward empathy, we get Pepper, which can identify the principle human emotions – joy, sadness, anger, and surprise – and adapt its behavior to accentuate the positive and comfort the negative. If we let fear guide the construction process, we get autonomous tanks, drones, and early prototypes of human-like warriors – not to mention fictional machine menaces like The Terminator that have haunted our imaginations since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It's fair to say that over the course of history, we imagine robots being more like the Terminator than Pepper.