The UK ranks highest in robot anxiety, with 52% of adults saying they feel worried that something might go wrong when they think about interacting with or working alongside robots. By contrast, South Korean adults report the lowest anxiety, at just 29%, according to The Robot Generation research, presented by Hexagon.
Results show that anxieties about robots are most acute where they are least visible in everyday life.
"People are not having a single abstract debate about 'robotics,'" says Burkhard Boeckem, CTO at Hexagon. "They are making practical judgments about where robots, in all their form factors, belong, what they should do, and how securely they are governed. Anxiety grows where robots feel invisible, poorly understood, or out of human control."
Key takeaways:
· The study suggests anxiety levels are closely correlated with exposure to robots in everyday life. For example, British adults are the least likely to have seen or used robots in real life (30%) and are the most worried (52%).
· When asked about AI, 61% of UK adults admitted to having used it in the past three months, and 56% said they consider AI chatbots to be robots.
· Adults are most comfortable with robots in factories and warehouses (63%, compared with 46% who are comfortable with robots in the home or 39% in classrooms), where tasks are well defined, and safety standards are well understood. Support is also strongest for robots that take on dangerous or physically demanding work, with half of respondents citing improved safety (50%) and productivity (51%) as the main benefits for robots in these contexts.
· This suggests that the popular assumption that people are most worried about job losses or machines "going rogue" isn't the public's top concern. Instead, the biggest source of anxiety is security.
· When asked what worries them most about the growing use of robots at work, a majority of adults (51%) cited the risk of robots being hacked or misused, putting data and systems at risk. This outranks concerns about physical malfunction or harm (41%) and job replacement (41%).
