Let’s face it: the machines have arrived. Are you sitting there wondering when you are going to be replaced by one? A 2013 study by Oxford economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne concluded (using a sophisticated algorithm, of course) that some 47 percent of US jobs were at high risk from automation in the next 20 years.
I’m 43 and lived through the 70s and 80s, where films about robots and machines were something way out there and would only really happen in the future. Let’s be honest, the “future” was a long way off, if it ever even happened. It was just scary to even think about automated machines walking and talking. Stuff like Westworld (1973) where a robot malfunctions, The Stepford Wives (1975) where the wives are in fact robots or even The Terminator (1984) and Robocop (1987) foretold the story of machines dictating our lives, so why are we so surprised when it’s happening now?