THERE ARE ROBOTS AMONG US

By WILLIAM TENN
Electronic robots, in one form or another, are influencing our daily lives . . . are we due for an "electronic revolution"?
THE AGE OF SCIENCE has made the word "robot" the focus of popular fears and hopes. The hope is that machines with minds, machines that can talk, think, and work like men, will give everyone a life of leisure. The fear is that robots will replace mankind, that they might run amuck and destroy their masters, that the robots will get us if we don't watch out. What was conceived as a work-saving machine has become the popular bogeyman of the age of science.
The robot nightmare hasn't been with us long, a little over 25 years. It pops up in films, in fiction, in newspaper editorials, every time someone develops a more advanced piece of programing for automatic machinery. When Remington Rand unveiled a computer which responded to written commands in ordinary English rather than computer code, prophets of mechanical doom made dire predictions on the future of mankind.