Robot takeover?

Wittenberg is the German city where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door 500 years ago and launched the Protestant Reformation. To mark the anniversary, the local Protestant authorities have installed a robot called BlessU-2 to deliver blessings in five languages.

The robot priest has a touchscreen chest, two arms and a head. After you have chosen your language the robot raises its arms, recites a verse from the Bible, and says: "God bless and protect you." It also beams light from its hands.

Just what we needed - and it comes with the full support of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau. "We wanted people to consider if it is possible to be blessed by a machine, or if a human being is needed," explained spokesman Stephan Krebs to The Guardian's religion correspondent, Harriet Sherwood. "The idea is to provoke debate."

When pressed, Krebs admits that they are not planning to replace human pastors with machines: "We don't want to robotize our church work, but see if we can bring a theological perspective to a machine." Good luck with that, then - but most people will just see this as another, rather comical example of robots taking over what used to be human jobs.

There's been much talk about the "robot revolution" in the media recently. Automation has already killed millions of jobs, we are warned, and cannot be stopped. To former assembly-line workers and bank tellers whose jobs were automated out of existence two decades ago, that has the ring of truth. Ten years from now, it will probably also ring true to millions of former taxi-, bus- and long-distance truck-drivers.

And automation may also be bringing us a political revolution. Many people suspect that shocking political events like Brexit, the...