Kurosawa-inspired bickering buddies C-3PO and R2-D2 have been bleep-blooping benevolently across our screens for nearly four decades, and the ranks of kindly machine heroes have been boosted in more recent times by Brad Bird's Iron Giant, Pixar's Wall-E and Baymax from Disney's Big Hero Six. One moment a high-flying corporate executive at Detroit's top mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products, the next splayed out on a display table, body peppered with automatic gunfire, after getting on the wrong side of the latest (if not necessarily greatest) in automated policing, Robocop's mighty Ed209. Paul Verhoeven's searing 1987 satire on corporate greed imagined a future in which the replacement of human beings with machines begins to spin horribly and inexorably out of control. Not according to killer robot expert Bonnie Docherty of Harvard University, who wrote recently that military robots with the ability to fire on targets independently of human control are swiftly moving towards reality thanks to rapid improvements in artificial intelligence. See also: The Terminator, Yul Brynner's Gunslinger from the 1973 Westworld movie.