The more I talked with engineers and civilians alike, the more I came to believe that this feeling was hardly unusual and that it went beyond the perfectly rational fear that a robot might take your job. “My deep worry is that every time you see a robot doing what a human does, there’s this visceral response — it’s human nature,” Julie Shah, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at M.I.T. and the leader of its Interactive Robotics Group, told me. This response is so intense, and so crucial to people’s acceptance or rejection of robots, that Masahiro Mori, a Japanese robotics professor, famously graphed it in 1970. He found that our affinity for robots increases as they come to look more and more human — until the point when the likeness is similar enough to momentarily fool the eye. Once the illusion is discovered, the viewer is unsettled and affinity plunges, a dip Mori dubbed “the uncanny valley.” The danger is that our uneasiness will prevent us from preparing for a future in which robots interact with humans in increasingly sophisticated ways, and one that — thanks to rapid advances in computing and mechanical engineering — is coming, and coming soon.

Much of the current political upheaval in the United States and other Western democracies can be traced to how threatened we feel when faced with this future. Central to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and presumably to his victories in manufacturing states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, was his promise to bring back the 10 percent of factory jobs that have disappeared in the wake of the Great Recession. But the fact is, American manufacturers are producing more products now than they were before the crash, with fewer workers, which suggests that those missing jobs have been automated. And while collaborative robots are showing up on factory floors first — where automation has always debuted, taking on repetitive, heavy and hazardous work — they are likely to find their way into other workplaces soon. (The “collaborative” label, widely used to imply coexistence, is a bit misleading; robots that can learn, problem-solve and simulate human emotion are still confined mostly to laboratories.) Already, surgical robots make it possible via remote control to perform low-risk operations in outpatient settings; robot home-health aids may soon help people with limited mobility get out of bed, cook meals and perform other routine tasks; and driverless vehicles are poised to take over the transportation and trucking industries. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how similar algorithms, or operating instructions, could enable robots to do many of the tasks required of waiters, maids and hospital workers. A few years ago, Amazon purchased Kiva Systems, which coordinates warehouse robots whose job is to move heavy boxes to stations where human stockers, whose fine motor skills have yet to be affordably mechanized, transfer the boxes to shelves.

“We’re moving into an era where people and infrastructure are in a more fluid relationship,” says David Mindell, a professor of aerospace engineering and the history of technology at M.I.T. The question is who will reap the economic rewards of that change. “We tend to think that automation, generally speaking, replaces humans, but really in the big picture that isn’t true,” James Bessen, an economist at Boston University, told me. Instead, it makes goods cheaper, increasing demand and creating more jobs. Only when a product or service becomes so cheap and ubiquitous that lowering its price can’t get people to buy any more of it does automation result in significant unemployment — unless the displaced workers are absorbed by a growing market for a different product or service, or the labor force shrinks.

Collaborative robots, designed to fill flexible roles and be smaller and easier to integrate among employees and existing machines, may have a subtler effect, raising the need for more nuanced measures of their socioeconomic impact. In one recent study, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the University of Oxford broke down 702 occupations in the United States in detail and analyzed the probability that they would be computerized. Nearly half of those jobs were found to have a “high risk” of being automated within the next few decades. Telemarketers, accountants, retail salespeople, technical writers and real estate agents would be first; chemical engineers, clergy, athletic trainers and dentists last. Conversely, a new McKinsey Global Institute report argues that we should stop considering “entire occupations” and instead focus on “individual activities.” A server must deliver and clear plates (tasks a robot might take over), but he or she also observes diners and anticipates their needs (tasks at which people are still far superior). From this perspective, fewer than 5 percent of careers can be completely automated using existing technology — but “about half of all the activities people are paid to do in the world’s work force could potentially be.”

In the West, Frankenstein’s monster embodies the threat of cutting-edge technology. We adopted the word “robot” from a popular 1921 play by the Czech writer Karel Capek about a factory that turns out robots, from robota, a Czech word for forced labor, who rise up and exterminate humanity. But the citizens of Singapore, Korea and Japan, the world’s leading users of industrial robots, and China, the most rapidly growing market for them, generally don’t share the same anxieties. In the Japanese canon, new technology often arrives as weaponry that Japanese scientists turn against an aggressor. (The nuclear parable of “Tetsuwan Atom,” a 1960s TV show about a heroic Japanese robot with an “atomic” heart, was lost in translation when it arrived in America as “Astro Boy.”) Viewing them through a different cultural lens, might we expect collaborative robots to augment a person’s skills, increasing his or her productivity — and thus value — without ruining any lives? Could we look forward to programming these machines to make our jobs better without fear of them usurping us? Or is it naïve to imagine that, if we cooperate with the robots, there won’t come a day when they can do everything we can do, only better, and their owners become our masters?

Ever since the invention of the transistor in 1947 started the transformation of computing — just a couple of years after the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs — philosophers have anticipated a day when intelligent machines would do all our work for us. Some pictured a dystopia like the one Jeremy Rifkin described in his 1995 book, “The End of Work”: “Like a deadly epidemic inexorably working its way through the marketplace, the strange, seemingly inexplicable new economic disease spreads, destroying lives and destabilizing whole communities in its wake.”