Why do we keep expecting robots to kill us?

A man died in an industrial accident at a Volkswagen factory in Germany Wednesday. Normally, this would have been little noted — industrial accidents are unfortunately common, with an estimated 4,000 workplace deaths every year in the U.S. alone

But this man had the misfortune to have been killed in the process of installing safety software on one of the factory's robots

The news flashed around the world, every headline a variation on the classic "man bites dog" — Robot Kills Man. To make matters more ominous, one of the reporters tweeting about the story was the Financial Times' Sarah O'Connor — who was apparently unaware of the Terminator franchise featuring her namesake, Sarah Connor, and didn't understand why so many of her replies talked about something called Skynet becoming self-aware Read more...