As a responsible journalist, my job is to shed light on complexity and, more importantly, to incite paranoia. I do this because I care about my readers.
You see, fear is good for you because it unleashes adrenalin, which fires up your senses and burns calories, making you less likely to fall prey to unemployment or 'globesity'.
My terror tactic this week is to revive the familiar fear that we could all one day be enslaved by the cold hands of robots. Indeed, some of us already are.
California has the Governator: a machine which, the story goes, was sent back in time to terminate Gray Davis. Why then shouldn't robots run the rest of the world and use us to oil their joints, wipe their plasma screens and put out the trash?
The scenario looks even more plausible in the light of the revelation that Cornell University scientists have made robots that can self-replicate, just like the machines in Michael Crichton's book Prey.
Blame the bizarrely named Hod Lipson, who led the research team. His robot army is built on modular cubes called 'molecubes', each containing the machinery and program necessary for replication.