Op-Ed: The real reason we're afraid of robots

It helps drive your car, recognizes your face at the airport's immigration checkpoint, interprets your CT scans, reads your resume, traces your interactions on social media, and even vacuums your carpet. As AI encroaches on every aspect of our lives, people watch with a mixture of fascination, bewilderment and fear. AI's overthrow of humanity is a familiar trope in popular culture, from Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" to the "Terminator" movies and "The Matrix." Some scholars express similar concerns. The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom worries that artificial intelligence poses a greater threat to humanity than climate change, and the bestselling historian Yuval Noah Harari warns that the history of tomorrow may belong to the cult of Dataism, in which humanity willingly merges itself into the flow of information controlled by artificial systems.