Gina Holechko figures humans have 50 years left -- 100, if we're lucky. After that, the robots become self-aware and harvest our skins to build hammocks. Think Transformers with the animosity of the Terminators.

Holechko is president of the Chicago Speculative Science Fiction Writers Group. She speculates, and so a few days before I headed to the Robots and Vision Motion Control Show in Rosemont, I called her, and she told me: "It's unfortunate Hollywood thinks about robots going rogue and murdering people without considering how a takeover might actually happen -- little by little, until we become comfortable. You talk to an automated voice to pay your phone bill? It's that kind of pervasiveness. What scares me is the shell they put on them now. We used to see the insides of our computers. Now you don't know what's going on. Go to the show, and look for the ghost in the machine. The ghost in the machine is your concern."

The soul, in a sense.

Robot holocaust?

Oh, it's coming.