Despite the gory headlines, objective data show that people all over the world are, on average, living longer, contracting fewer diseases, eating more food, spending more time in school, getting access to more culture, and becoming less likely to be killed in a war, murder, or an accident. When pessimists are forced to concede that life has been getting better and better for more and more people, they have a retort at the ready. We are cheerfully hurtling toward a catastrophe, they say, like the man who fell off the roof and said, "So far so good" as he passed each floor. Or we are playing Russian roulette, and the deadly odds are bound to catch up to us. Or we will be blindsided by a black swan, a four-sigma event far along the tail of the statistical distribution of hazards, with low odds but calamitous harm.

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.

Scared and confused – how consumers feel about the impending AI revolution. Government and industry are rushing to develop, deploy and adopt AI, with talk of robots taking over the world firmly regarded as tongue-in-cheek and the stuff of Hollywood movies. However, a new study has revealed that some robot fears are very much a reality among consumers, with these fears causing consumers to shy away from using AI-based technology. The Pegasystems survey of 6,000 customers across six countries found that close to three quarters (68%) of Brits express some sort of fear about AI, with almost one quarter (23%) worried about robots taking over the world. Further findings revealed the potential impact of these deep-rooted fears on businesses, with less than one in three (28%) of British consumers comfortable with businesses using AI to engage with them.

President Trump portrays Mexico, China and global trade as the biggest threats to American manufacturing jobs. "It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers of jobs and companies lost," Trump tweeted on January 26. His predecessor also offered a warning to American workers, of a different kind. "The next wave of economic dislocations won't come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle class jobs obsolete," President Obama said in his farewell address.

Lawyers, doctors and accountants may be redundant in 20 years after scientists have claimed their jobs will be taken over by robots . A study into the future of human employment has predicted a surge in machine-led work such as robotic counsellors, body part makers and virtual lawyers. This is bad news for those in the profession, who could see themselves out of a job due to highly-skilled artificial intelligence. The worrying research suggests that humans will be replaced because robots are able to produce better results. A report compiled by professor of management practice at London Business School, Lynda Gratton, and futurologist David A. Smith, looked at different sector jobs.