So here’s the thing. There are a lot of silly phrases that internet hipsters love to use, but there’s one that I see on twitter almost constantly.  ”I, for one, welcome our [robot/zombie/Chinese/hacker/Google/etc.] overlords.”

It’s clever. No, really. It is.

But I think it’s helping to seed the completely unwarranted fear of and hostility towards robots.  For example, Dodge offers us a darker interpretation of the Jetsons’ assembly-line wake-up routine:

I’m sensing some hostility toward Honda’s ASIMO.

Or this, under the headline “Countdown to Robot Takeover: They Can Play Pool Now”

Come on, gents. Somebody has to be good at pool.

Or what about this headline, “Robot Waiters Will Kill Us All”

The day that robots will discover intelligence and kill us all just got a little closer. Dalu Rebot, a new restaurant in China, uses two robot receptionists to greet their patrons and six robot waiters to shuttle food to and from the table. The bots are not totally lifelike – they have to follow a set path to serve food and drinks, and they won’t tell you about the off-off Broadway musical they’re starring in. More robots are planned – it’s only a matter of time before they invade our shores. Is anyone freaked out by how much that one on the bike looks like Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man?

I don’t think we have to worry that robot receptionists and waiters greeting us and serving us food will be a precursor to the robot apocalypse.  First things first – they’ll learn to expel fluids into your food.

But then, from time to time, there is the modernist’s lament – that people are failing to accept the inevitable. That they are not being faithful toadies to the whims of technologists; that they are resisting Skynet; that they’re too damn sensitive to the Uncanny Valley. Well. Whatever.

Actually, no.  Not ‘whatever’. There’s something about this article about the need for carer robots in Japan as the population ages without a younger generation and the traditionally strong family ties to care for them.  The heartless automatons here aren’t the robots, which are only trying to run their still limited programs.  The heartless automatons are, weirdly enough, the burdensome elderly, who refuse to accept these well-meaning carer robots. (Or at least, might refuse to – the article doesn’t actually suggest they won’t.)

Anyway. Robot overlords, or enslaved robots living in some kind of morbid Ishiguro plot. I, for one, welcome them all.