Fear of Robots

Which fears the review identified

A systematic search of six databases covering January 2014 to March 2025 identified 49 studies of how older adults experience social robots, together covering 6,670 participants in 16 countries. The review's thematic synthesis produced seven fear categories.

The seven:

• privacy and autonomy concerns
• trust and reliability issues
• emotional and ethical discomfort
• usability challenges
• fear of dependence
• unfamiliarity with technology
• the uncanny valley effect

Only the last of those is a reaction to a robot as an object. The rest describe a machine that watches, that might fail, that raises questions the person did not want to be asked, that is difficult to operate, that they might come to need, and that they have never used before.

The review names fear of robots among older adults as a critical barrier to adoption, which is the practical reason it exists: social robots are being proposed as a response to ageing populations, and the people they are proposed for are the ones frightened of them.

Why the fear of dependence is unusual

Six of the seven categories have obvious parallels elsewhere in this catalogue. The fear of dependence does not.

It is not a fear that the machine will fail or intrude. It is a fear of coming to rely on it, which means the feared outcome is the technology working. Nothing else in the vocabulary of phobias describes an aversion to being helped, and it is the category most specific to this population: the assistance on offer is the kind that, once accepted, is difficult to give back.

The review found fear levels shaped by the design of the robot, by cultural background, by prior experience of technology and by the care setting, and it found four things associated with better acceptance: designing with older adults rather than for them, gradual exposure, transparent system behaviour, and interaction that matches the emotional register of the situation.

What people object to is not usefulness

A Polish study took a different approach, conducting 50 semi-structured in-depth interviews with people of varied backgrounds about artificial intelligence and robots in healthcare, and analysing them qualitatively.

Three themes came out: positive perceptions, negative perceptions, and a third the authors call ontological concerns about artificial intelligence, which they note went beyond objections about whether the technology is useful.

That is the finding worth keeping. A person can accept that a machine works and still object to it, and the objection is about what kind of thing it is rather than what it does. No amount of demonstrated performance answers that, which is why the acceptance strategies the other review identifies are about transparency and participation rather than about proving the robot is good at its job.

What the dictionaries call the word

Wiktionary labels robophobia internet slang and otherwise rare, and defines it as fear or hatred of robots or of artificial intelligence. The or is the usual one, joining an emotion to an attitude.

Its neighbour is being drafted. An article on discrimination against robots exists on Wikipedia as a draft, filed under the projects for artificial intelligence and for discrimination, and unrated on both. Somebody is preparing the prejudice term before there is a population to be prejudiced against.