I found myself thinking about these questions (when I should've been prepping for the poetry class) after I'd looked at the ten coolest robots site posted earlier.
Both artificial intelligence and robots are duplications of humans - each attempts to replicate what humans can do through available technology. Both are also decidedly non-organic, which distinguishes AI and robots from cloning or genetic engineering which uses as its base materials the same stuff human bodies are already made of. So robots and AI skirt the problem of being too much like us because they're not built out of the same materials as us.
(Though to this last point, one could argue that it isn't robots who are becoming like us, but we who are becoming like robots as we increasingly rely on the kinds of materials robots are made out of to create artificial hips, hearts, or cochlear implants)
When I read science fiction (or science fact for that matter) about artificial intelligence and robots, they are relatively indistinguishable in their ability to threaten human beings, but they way in which they do so is distinctly different. I would take The Terminator (the first one) and I, Robot as two films that are representative of the difference between robot threats and AI threats in literature, as well as in the writing of some futurists who think about what our world would like like
In The Terminator, the AI that builds the terminator machines and threatens to wipe out humanity bases its decision on logic and enacts it through the bodies of the robots it creates. The threat of nuclear war - its primary mode of attack against the humans - is presented as a threat only through the dreams of Sarah Connor however. The storyline of the film does not take us to the place where the AI dwells, or even to the battlesites it creates except through Reese's memories (flashbacks) or in Sarah's imagination of what that world looks like. The repetition of the opening sequence, which could conceivably be argued to be a glimpse of the storyworld of the future, in a dream/memory, clearly labels it as a memory, and subject to amplification or modification as most memories and dreams are. So we never see where the AI "lives".
In Terminator we also never "see" the AI, which presumably is embodied somewhere as the defense system, and so as viewers we are never directly presented with the "enemy" and have no visual image of what it looks like. [The Terminator attraction at Orlando does however present an image of the AI, not present in any of the movies, in its 3D stage/cinema production in which the freedom fighters actually penetrate the defense system and blow up the "mind" of Skynet (which looks suspiciously like the power system inside the Deathstar)]
As viewers, we only see the threat of the robot body as it stalks, maims, and eventually kills human bodies.
In I, Robot, the intelligence behind the robot threat is also less overtly threatening than the robot bodies. We are presented with VIKI, both as the visual display at the interface with which the humans interact and also in her housing (which again, is suspended in midair... what's with this motif in film anyway?). But VIKI isn't perceived as a threat until late in the film. Because we identify with the paranoid protagonist, as viewers, our perception of the threat is kept in line with the threat Spooner perceives, which is literally embodied in the robot bodies of the new NS5 models.
These two movies pinpoint the two real differences between robots and AI that seem to underly our anxieties about the threat they pose; one is highly visible and somatic, while the other difference lies in the imitative nature of each technology.
AI is a cognitive threat - a machine that can outthink human beings - but because the threat is from the machine's ability to think, it is largely invisible, just as our mental processes are not visible to others. In some ways, this makes the threat more insidious because you can't see it coming. It also makes the threat less immediate because there's no object which fear can point to as the threat. In the Terminator movie in particular, the threat posed by AI is global - the extermination of all humans - which is hard for the audience to imagine, given that it is composed of human beings and our collective ego has a very difficult time imagining a world in which we no longer exist.
Malevolent AI systems contain the threat of an intelligent opponent, but more importantly, of an emotionless opponent. In most human conflicts, there have always been human connections that defy the logic of the opposition between two sides - think the actions of people like Oskar Schindler or Christmas Day armistices. One on one, we at least have the option of appealing to common humanity when confronting an enemy. When confronting an AI system, there is no commonality aside from the ability to use logic, but for the AI system, unlike humans, emotion or sentiment is not a part of a reasoned argument. The inhumane thoughts of AI are what is most threatening; they're also what we can't see coming.
The technology of robots is embodied in a physical object, so the threat is much more immediate. The threat is also directed against human bodies. In I, Robot, Will Smith's character is physically pummeled by the robots, he chases Sonny, and the police are held hostage by the physical intervention of the robots; the human race is threatened, but the image of the threat is embodied in the robots themselves, not VIKI. In this way, robots are easier to imagine as enemies. They are physically present, but although they are strong, they are not indestructable. We can imagine ways of getting past their strengths by using even greater strength. Sarah Connor's act of crushing the Terminator brings that home in the movie.
But what is the weapon against an AI system that has decided that human beings are unnecessary (or perhaps even dangerous)? The logic that produces such a decision cannot be reversed by an appeal to sentiment or emotion. When it comes right down to it, the threat posed by malevolent AI in science fiction often emerges from the observation that logically, the human race has done nothing that automatically warrants its survival. We've messed up the planet, we mess each other up, we're thinking about going out and messing up the rest of the universe. What logical intelligence would conclude that keeping human beings around has any benefit whatsoever? Let's face it, we don't have much going for us.
So each threat - from AI or from robots gone bad - emerges from a difference between AI or robots and humans. The robot threat - strength and a hard body - can be countered by our use of other machines. The AI threat can only be countered by an appeal to sentiment, something that won't work on a machine, no matter how eloquently stated. In science fiction, the threat from AI intelligence has greater consequences for human beings, usually because the AI has been given a lot of power, but it's relatively rare that a story imagines only an AI threat. In most disaster scenarios, the AI needs robot bodies, or at least machines, to carry out its plans, returning us to materiality just as the robot body does. So it looks like bodies still win as the immediate threat that gets the most air time, but more distubing possibilities lie in the possibility that a malevolent AI could do more damage than a legion of robots could ever accomplish.
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