Industrial robots, though having made fast progress since then, are not yet thinking machines which can act independently. They are more like advanced clockworks, although far more precisely operated. Now, industrial robots can be seen to do hard labor everywhere around us, especially in factories and laboratories. They perform repetitive and dangerous tasks, lift heavy objects, conduct tests in severe environments, or help medical doctors with difficult operations. Products are manufactured infinitely faster and cheaper than before, thanks to them. They are sent deep into the sea, into volcanoes, and even to other planets where they are subjected to extreme conditions, doing what humans might be supposed to do at the risk of their lives. Modern industrial robots have significantly contributed to comfort and safety in work environments. Now, for the first time in human history, robots are about to evolve into independent, living creatures. The invention of artificial intelligence (AI) broke a barrier no human generation had ever reached before, and nobody knows for sure what might become of the innovative leap. So far, the prospect seems to have stirred more fears than hopes. In 2016, for example, when Google's AlphaGo beat the world's elite go players, one by one, the shock and dread that robots might finally assume life struck the global population. The fear was that an independent creature might someday escape human control.

The fear that human beings might create a living thing that cannot be controlled is not new. It is called Frankenstein anxiety and owes its name to the novel―Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley. In this book, scientist Victor Frankenstein collects pieces of dead bodies and from them creates a Monster. The Monster turns out to have superb intelligence and eventually turns against its creator, with dreadful results. After Shelley, in the genre of science fiction, countless artificial beings were depicted as becoming dangerous. Human beings were seen to be replaced with their own creation. In the movie The Terminator, released in the 1980s, highly developed AI robots finally decide to wipe the human race off the face of the earth. If robots are supposed to follow the way of human imagination, we see a horrible future ahead, don't we? Maybe, but probably not. Fictional imagination concerning robots not only rang warning bells but also offered a way forward. Isaac Asimov, sometimes referred to as the father of science fiction, who first coined the word robotics, saw no point in too much worry. He pointed out that robots are machines―advanced, but still machines. He believed that safety factors should be built into robots, as well as into other machines like cars and planes. The safety measures Asimov devised for his fictional robots were the famous Three Fundamental Laws of Robotics.