Anxiety that a created system will turn on its creator, which shapes public response to new technology independently of the technology.
Asimov coined it in 1947 and considered it an irrational reflex, which is why he wrote the Three Laws — to build stories in which the machines were constrained and the problems arose anyway.
In practice
- A hospital's new triage algorithm is opposed on grounds nobody can quite specify, and the specification arrives after the objection.
- A firm's staff resist an automated scheduling system with an intensity the actual proposal does not warrant, and the resistance is about the category.
- Standing
- Asimov coined it to name what he considered an irrational reflex.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- How technologies spread, scale, decay and frighten us