Will Real-Life Blade Runners be Tax Collectors? Fast Future Publishing

In 1979, an innovative two-minute TV commercial gave Britain a glimpse of the future. Choreographed to music from Rossini's Barber of Seville, hi-tech machines built the Fiat Strada. The tagline was "Handbuilt by Robots." Humans were nowhere to be seen in the Turin factory where the ad was shot, but the film crew knew where the people were: outside, on picket lines protesting the loss of their jobs. Fast forward nearly 40 years and "the robots are coming, they want to replace us, and there's nothing we can do to stop them" isn't the plot of the next season of Westworld, it's a real-world warning that's becoming louder with each new leap in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Both the technoprogressive enthusiasts and the head-in-the-sand reactionaries believe doomsayers are overstating the threat.