In a recent essay for the socialist journal Current Affairs, Matthew James Seidel recounted a story from 2013 where “delivery drivers came up with an unexpected way to prevent robots from taking their jobs. They beat the robots with baseball bats and stabbed them in their ‘faces.’” Seidel quipped that “[s]ome robots got off easy; they were merely abducted and shut away in basements.”

The intellectual–and sometimes physical–battle over the use of robots to replace human labor was the subject of a late 1983 episode of The Computer Chronicles. This program featured demonstrations of two early attempts at making robotics more accessible to students and programmers. There was also a surprisingly in-depth discussion over the long-term implications that robotics would have on society.