Many people fear that if fully sentient machine intelligence ever comes to exist, it will take over the world. The real threat, though, is the risk of tech companies enslaving robots to drive up profits, author Martha Wells suggests in her far-future-set book series The Murderbot Diaries. In Wells’s world, machine intelligences inhabit spaceships and bots, and half-human, half-machine constructs offer humans protection from danger (in the form of “security units”), as well as sexual pleasure (“c...