Last week both the New York Times and New Scientist featured articles seriously speculating about the danger posed to humans by intelligent, belligerent robots. This week The Telegraph follows suite (Markoff, John, “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man,” The New York Times, 26 July 2009, p. A1; Campbell, MacGregor, “Artificial Intelligence Researchers Confront Sci-Fi Scenarios,” New Scientist, 29 July 2009; “Military Killer Robots ‘Could Endanger Civilians’,” The Telegraph, 3 August 2009). Also this week, an older story made the rounds about a Swedish company that was fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot lashed out and nearly killed a maintenance worker (“Robot Attacked Swedish Factory Worker,” The Local, 28 April 2009). The prosecutor stated that, “I’ve never heard of a robot attacking somebody like this,” but as Matthew Yglesias points out, it’s not just the proletariat that’s under attack: Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was attacked by a robot in 2005 (“Robot Attacks Aren’t Just for Comedy, ThinkProgress, 29 July 2009; “Robot Attacks Japanese Prime Minister,” we make money not art, 21 August 2005). Finally, not only do we fret and fantasize over disaster, we make satire of it as well, as in this extreme anti-smoking video (Woerner, Meredith, “Smoking: It’s Only Enabling The Machines,” io9, 3 August 2009).

That’s a lot of fretting over robots for one week. Even 25 years after The Terminator (IMDB | Wikipedia), the robot apocalypse has remained a pretty geeky fantasy / disaster, but I would say that it’s approaching NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) / CERN accidentally creating a mini-black hole level consciousness as a destroyer of humanity. Now if we could just gin up a little more fear over nanotech / grey goo / ecophagy / ice-9.