Robots were dreamt up 100 years ago – why haven’t our fears about them changed since?

The robots dreamt up over the last hundred years have similar traits:

• Highly efficient mechanical or genetically modified/cloned humans created artificially through an industrial process.
• Doing mundane tasks that humans used to do with precision and without the need of rest.
• Being extremely rational and logical, lacking the human element of uncertainty and unpredictability.
• A danger to humanity, with the potential to destroy human civilization.
• Robots mixed with capitalism, nationalism, or rapid technological progress becoming a highly dangerous cocktail of destruction.
• Robots reading human history and concluding that murder and conquest is the norm.

We are unconsciously transferring our desires, fears, violence and genocidal tendencies to the synthetic creatures.

Whether it is the 1921 play R.U.R., or Avengers movie Age Of Ultron, robots who gain sentience or consciousness are almost always hell-bent on committing genocide, eradicating mankind in the most ruthless and efficient manner. This may be due to us making robots (or even artificial intelligence) in our own image, much like the stories of Gods that we have read.