Today's AI robots have nothing on the Daleks! LHS Insights

As a child, growing up with the 1970's and 80's episodes of the BBC TV series, the only way I could be convinced to watch the Saturday tea-time showings of Dr Who was by robbing the family dog of its worn old blanket and sitting with it over my head, peering at the TV (with its'remote' control attached to the TV unit on a cable) through a chewed hole. It was my way of convincing my 8-year old myself that I was safe and that it wasn't all real. And yet, even stripping away the blanket and upgrading the TV (and remote control) tech quite a bit, and replacing the Daleks with for example, Arnie's Terminator, the Matrix's Machines, Ex Machina's Ava (or even the comedy Fembots in Austin Powers), man's age-old fear of the machine and relentless need to fight, overpower and destroy it hasn't really changed that much … even if some of the methods have. From the industrial revolution onwards, our relationship with machines and technology of any variety has always been'love/hate'. Even the fact that films like Wall-E, Big Hero and the Iron Giant, and characters like The Hitchhiker's' bulbous Marvin and Star Wars' R2-D2, C-3PO and more recently, BB-9, have such a fond film-following stems in part from our need to'humanise' robots and make them less scary.