People have been worried about machines taking jobs for a very long time. As early as 1930, John Maynard Keynes was warning about the new scourge of technological unemployment, which he termed as "unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor." The fear has only grown more powerful in the software age. In one recent story, a few automation upgrades ended up making 20 workers redundant at a small 3D-modeling company. A recent McKinsey study estimated that as many as half of current jobs could be automated, and predicted 400 million jobs worldwide will be automated into nothingness by 2030.

Robots are not our friends, Hillary Clinton said Wednesday. The former secretary of state told radio host Hugh Hewitt that America is racing headfirst into a world of artificial intelligence without considering the repercussions. "Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, a lot of really smart people are sounding an alarm that we're not hearing," she said. "The future is coming right at us, and honest to goodness, I just think everybody listening to you should be demanding that public officials start coming up with some approaches to how we're going to protect human beings and our lives from this." Clinton expressed particular concern about the loss of jobs due to automation and the potential rise of surveillance associated with the internet of things like Smart TVs and home assistants.

How do you stop a robot from hurting people? Many existing robots, such as those assembling cars in factories, shut down immediately when a human comes near. But this quick fix wouldn't work for something like a self-driving car that might have to move to avoid a collision, or a care robot that might need to catch an old person if they fall. With robots set to become our servants, companions and co-workers, we need to deal with the increasingly complex situations this will create. Science fiction already envisioned this problem.