How do we really feel about robots?

For more than 100 years, writers, artists and filmmakers have sketched out their visions of the household robot, a supposedly inevitable culmination of human technological advancement. One day, these multitasking machines will, we’re told, perform tedious tasks efficiently and without complaint, respond courteously to requests and remain unobtrusively compliant and meek. In The Automatic Maid-Of-All-Work (1893), author ML Campbell described such a machine as “a queer looking thing, with…