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The robots are coming to slowly but surely take over the world, a scary thought to consider but one that could soon be a reality.

But don’t worry, we don’t mean hordes of Arnold-shaped killing machines reducing the face of the earth to a post-apocalyptic mess. But more friendly WALL.E type lads that will take some of life’s boring automation on for you and won’t complain in the process.

A study by the Oxford University of over 700 of the most common occupations found that millions of UK works could be in danger of being replaced by computers and robots.

Amongst those most in danger were Telemarketers, Examiners and Insurance Underwriters, which won’t bring too much of a tear to the eye of many.

Luckily for us at Walton Bridge Garage, Mechanical Engineers were on the list of least likely to be automated by robots, so it seems like our outstanding customer service and top notch mechanical work is safe from our future metal overlords for the moment at least.

But why are we banging on about this in the first place?

Well, a prototype self-driving race car made its debut this weekend and it all went rather scarily to plan!

The ‘Devbot’ was built by the white coats over at Roborace, the electric racing boffins who were brought on to support the Formula E championship (we guess someone has to) with another all-electric racing series.

A few weeks back Roborace released this, the latest conception of how a full-size autonomous race car might look. There aren’t many similarities between this and the Devbot and that’s because, perhaps worryingly, Devbot has a cabin in which to imprison a human slave.

This is to “allow teams to develop their software and experience the hardware that will be used on the ‘Robocar. Unlike the Robocar the DevBot has a cabin that can be driven by a human or a computer allowing teams to fully understand how the car thinks and feels on a racetrack alongside the comprehensive real-time data.”

Yeah, of course that’s why.

But Vettel, Hamilton and co need not yet worry about getting down to the Job Centre. Devbot only completed one lap of Donnington on its first outing so is some way off replacing the lads on the F1 track. But Kinetik, the London-based investment fund behind Devbot hopes that it can release a completely autonomous, electric race series as soon as the next few months.

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