9 Everyday Inventions That Caused Widespread Panic

6. Robots Are Taking Our Jobs .... Veeery Slowly

Fear of robots has been around for as long as robots have - which is probably a lot longer than you'd think.

Whilst these days we tend to imagine that the new almost constant presence of robots in our lives is going to put us out of a job and/or enslave the human race, we only really think that this is a new development because we've forgotten that robots have been in our lives and our homes for a long time. For example, people in the 1950s feared that a robot that cleans the dishes, and another that washes the clothes, would render women obsolete.

You may have noticed that this has so far failed to happen and, in reality, allowing robots to take over the more menial tasks of daily life frees humans up for other things. Now that they've got the dishes, laundry and vacuuming down without incident, will automating other time consuming tasks in the workforce be much different?