What’s the Deal With All the Robots in This Year’s Super Bowl Ads?

If you’ve watched even a few of the ads in Super Bowl LIII, you might have noticed two prevailing themes in this year’s commercial roundup: that there are an awful lot of robots kicking around these ads, and the presence of all this artificial intelligence-in the eyes of the humans, at least-isn’t such a good thing.
Sprint’s spot, for example, shows a robot creating an advertisement that, with all due respect to the great Bo Jackson, is nonsensical and utterly ridiculous. The Amazon ad Not Everything Makes the Cut, shows the epic fails that ensue when Alexa is installed in devices like electric toothbrushes or put in charge of the electrical grid.