Or, as a story from the golden age of sci-fi comics so neatly put it: “Dogs used to be man’s best friend — now robots are! Civilization needs them for many important tasks!” (Judging from the cone-shaped breasts of the woman being lectured to in the comic, I’d date this to the early 1950s.) In another story, “The Perfect Servant,” Hugo the Robot — who looks a lot like the Tin Woodman from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” a character whose influence on the world of robots has not been duly recognized — says, “I am proud to be a robot and proud to serve as fine a master as Professor Tompkins!” But Hugo also says, “I do not understand women.”

Uh-oh. Hugo knows how to make the windows gleam, arrange the flowers and set the table perfectly, but something’s missing. Who designed this guy? My guess is Professor Tompkins. Those darned mad scientists, missing a human chip or two themselves, always get something wrong.

And thereby hangs many a popular tale; for although we’ve pined for them and designed them, we’ve never felt down-to-earth regular-folks comfy with humanoid robots. There’s nothing that spooks us more, say those who study such things, than beings that appear to be human but aren’t quite. As long as they look like the Tin Woodman and have funnels on their heads, we can handle them; but if they look almost like us — if they look, for instance, like the “replicants” in the film “Blade Runner”; or like the plastic-faced, sexually compliant fake Stepford Wives; or like the enemy robot-folk in the “Terminator” series, human enough until their skins burn off — that’s another matter.

The worry seems to be that perfected robots, instead of being proud to serve their creators, will rebel, resisting their subservient status and eliminating or enslaving us. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice or the makers of golems, we can work wonders, but we fear that we can’t control the results. The robots in “R.U.R.” ultimately triumph, and this meme has been elaborated upon in story after story, both written and filmed, in the decades since.

A clever variant was supplied by John Wyndham in his 1954 story “Compassion Circuit,” in which empathetic robots, designed to react in a caring way to human suffering, cut off a sick woman’s head and attach it to a robot body. At the time Wyndham was writing, this plot line was viewed with some horror, but today we would probably say, “Awesome idea!” We’re already accustomed to the prospect of our future cyborgization, because — as Marshall McLuhan noted with respect to media — what we project changes us, what we farm also farms us, and thus what we roboticize may, in the future, roboticize us.

Maybe. Up to a point. If we let it.

Although I grew up in the golden age of sci-fi robots, I didn’t see my first functional piece of robotics until the early ’70s. It wasn’t a whole humanoid, but a robotic arm and hand used at the Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratory in Ontario to manipulate radioactive materials behind a radiation-proof glass shield. Many of the same principles were employed in the Canadarm space-shuttle manipulator arm of the 1980s, and many more applications for robotic arms have since been identified, including remote surgery and — my own interest — remote writing. I helped develop the LongPen in 2004 to facilitate remote book signings, but, as is the way with golems, it escaped from the intentions of its creator and is now busily engaging with the worlds of banking, business, sports and music. Who’d have thought?