Why UK robot anxiety is the highest in the world
UK robot anxiety is a measurable, documented phenomenon — and a new global study puts it at the top of an uncomfortable league table. According to Hexagon’s “Robot Generation” study, published on March 10, 2026, 52% of UK adults say they feel worried that something might go wrong when interacting with or working alongside robots. That figure is the highest of any country surveyed across the study’s nine major markets, and the data points to a single, counterintuitive culprit: the UK simply hasn’t seen enough robots in action.
The study surveyed 18,000 participants across nine major markets, making it one of the more substantial cross-national snapshots of public attitudes toward robotics taken in recent years. The findings arrive at a moment when governments and corporations worldwide are accelerating robotics deployment — which makes the UK’s position particularly awkward. A population that is already the most anxious about robots is now being asked to welcome more of them.
The exposure gap driving fear
The most striking finding in Hexagon’s data is not the anxiety figure itself — it’s the correlation with exposure. Only 30% of UK adults report having seen or used robots in real life, the lowest proportion among all countries surveyed. Compare that to China, where 75% of adults have encountered robots directly and 81% express excitement about their potential. South Korea, which records the lowest robot anxiety of any surveyed nation at just 29%, is similarly a country where robots are a visible, routine part of industrial and public life.
The pattern is stark: the less you see robots, the more you fear them. Hexagon’s own framing — “robot anxiety is highest where robots are least visible” — reads like a promotional nudge toward greater deployment, and it is worth noting that Hexagon has a commercial interest in normalising robotics adoption. But the underlying data point is difficult to dismiss. Familiarity genuinely does appear to reduce fear. People across all markets report feeling most comfortable with robots in factories and warehouses, and anxiety drops when robots are visibly working safely alongside humans.
Physical robots vs. software AI: a telling distinction
What makes the UK’s position more nuanced is that British adults are not technophobic in any general sense. Sixty-one percent of UK adults used AI in the three months prior to the survey, and 56% consider AI chatbots to be robots. Yet anxiety spikes sharply when the conversation shifts from software AI to physical machines. This distinction matters. A chatbot that gives a wrong answer is an inconvenience. A physical robot operating in a shared space represents a different category of perceived risk — one that is harder to override or ignore.
Globally, the top concern about robots is security and hacking, cited by 51% of respondents, ahead of job replacement at 41% and trust issues at 24%. The hacking concern is telling. It suggests that public wariness is not purely about robots replacing workers — a narrative that dominates most media coverage — but about the vulnerability of connected physical systems to external interference. A robot that can be hacked is not just a productivity risk; it is a physical safety risk.
Data centers face the same local resistance
The Hexagon study lands alongside a separate but related finding: UK residents are also resistant to having data centers built in their local communities. The opposition is driven by security concerns and environmental worries — the same twin anxieties that animate the robot debate. This is not coincidental. Both data centers and robots represent the physical infrastructure of a digital economy that many people interact with only abstractly. When that infrastructure becomes local and visible, resistance follows.
The pattern here mirrors the robot exposure gap. Unfamiliarity breeds opposition. Data centers, like robots, tend to generate more anxiety in communities that have little direct experience of them and limited understanding of what they actually do. The challenge for the industry is not purely technical — it is communicative.
Is the UK’s robot anxiety a problem that will solve itself?
The exposure argument suggests that as robots become more common in UK workplaces and public spaces, anxiety will naturally decline. That is plausible, but it assumes a smooth deployment curve that is far from guaranteed. If early robot rollouts in the UK produce high-profile failures — safety incidents, job displacement without retraining, or security breaches — the anxiety gap could widen rather than close. South Korea and China did not achieve low anxiety by accident; they built it through sustained, visible, and largely successful integration of robotics into everyday industrial life.
What does the Hexagon Robot Generation study actually measure?
The Hexagon “Robot Generation” study surveyed 18,000 adults across nine major markets, published in March 2026. It measured attitudes including anxiety levels, real-world exposure to robots, and views on specific concerns such as hacking, job replacement, and trust. The study is one of the largest cross-national surveys of robot attitudes conducted to date.
Why are Brits more anxious about robots than other countries?
The primary factor identified in the Hexagon study is low exposure: only 30% of UK adults have seen or used robots in real life, the lowest rate among surveyed countries. The study found a consistent pattern across markets — anxiety falls where robots are routinely visible and working safely alongside people. The UK’s limited real-world contact with robots appears to be the main driver of its 52% anxiety rate.
What are people most worried about when it comes to robots?
Globally, the top concern is security and hacking, cited by 51% of respondents in the Hexagon study — ahead of job replacement at 41% and general trust issues at 24%. This suggests that public anxiety about robots is less about unemployment fears and more about the vulnerability of connected physical systems to cyberattacks.
The UK’s position at the top of the robot anxiety table is not a fixed cultural trait — it is a measurable consequence of low exposure, and that is something policy and industry can actually address. The harder question is whether the rollout of robots and data center infrastructure in the UK will be managed carefully enough to build trust rather than confirm fears. Right now, the data suggests the gap between public comfort and technological ambition has never been wider.
Edited by the All Things Geek team.
Source: TechRadar
