I'd assumed until recently that early robots and other forms of artificial being were friendly and regarded as a good thing in early science fiction. Now it seems they were symbols of arrogance and guilt right from the start!

The cancelled Catholic intellectual E Michael Jones points out that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley may have been afflicted by guilt over the suicide of Harriet, Percy Shelley's estranged wife. Frankenstein's monster became an object that guilt. Similarly, in Aliens, the monsters represent guilt over growing sexual licence and abortion, he suggests.

If true this sort of thing may explain why the monsters are typically extremely powerful, can break through steel doors, etc. One cannot escape from them just as one cannot escape from a guilty conscience.

So our ideas about robots may say more about us than about robots. It would be a shame if psychological baggage were to hamper the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). It would mean that science fiction has primed us to reject the sub-creation of life merely because we project easily onto anything that resembles ourselves: even before it has come into existence.