South Korea committed 16 trillion won, about $10.3 billion, to putting more robots in front of its workforce this year alone. You would expect that to make people nervous but it has not.
We have been telling ourselves a fairly simple story about robots and fear: the more of them show up in daily life, the more anxious people get about being replaced, overseen, or eventually made obsolete by them. It is an intuitive story. It is also, according to the largest study of its kind, mostly wrong.
Hexagon's Robot Generation study asked 9,000 adults across nine countries how they actually feel about robots showing up at work and at home. The most anxious population was the UK, at 52 percent, where only 30 percent of adults have ever actually seen or used a robot in real life. The least anxious, at 29 percent, was South Korea, a country that has spent the last two years turning robot deployment into a matter of national policy.
Japan sits close behind at 35 percent, backed by its own $6.1 billion, five year plan to put ten million robots into hospitals, farms, and factories by 2040. Both governments are pouring public money into the exact thing conventional wisdom says should be terrifying their workers. Instead, those workers are some of the calmest about it on record.
In South Korea and Japan, a robot is not an abstraction encountered secondhand in headlines about layoffs. It is visible, doing a defined job in a warehouse or a hospital ward, in full view of the people working next to it.
Michael Szollosy, a robotics research fellow who worked on the study, described what happens next: "When people actually meet a robot, especially a small, friendly one, the fear often disappears. You can almost hear them think, 'Oh, that's not going to take over the world.'"
There is a second twist worth sitting with before you draw the obvious conclusion. China is the most robot-exposed country in the study, 75 percent of adults there have seen or used one, and also the most excited, at 81 percent. But its anxiety score sits in the middle of the pack, roughly tied with Germany. Exposure did not erase fear there the way it did in South Korea and Japan. It just made room for excitement to grow alongside it.
That is the interesting twist. Visibility alone is not the fix. What separates South Korea and Japan from China in this data is not how many robots people have seen, it is how tightly those robots are tied to one clear, bounded job. Hexagon's CTO, Burkhard Boeckem, put it this way: "Anxiety grows where robots feel invisible, poorly understood, or out of human control."
One more finding is worth keeping in mind. Across the full study, the top concern about robots at work was not job loss. It was security, the fear of a robot being hacked or misused, at 51 percent, ahead of both physical harm and being replaced, both at 41 percent. Most rollout plans are built to reassure people about their jobs. Almost none are built to reassure people about who else might be controlling the machine.
None of this means a national robotics budget is the only route to a calmer workforce. But it does suggest that introducing a robot quietly and hoping nobody notices has the causality backwards. The fear was never really about the robot arriving. It was about the robot arriving unexplained, ungoverned, and half hidden.
It's easy to read all this and think, that's a someday problem, not mine yet. But sixteen billion dollars doesn't get spent on someday. This is already happening, just somewhere else for now, and it's a lot closer than it feels from here.
Hexagon (2026). Robot anxiety is highest where robots are least visible, new global study from Hexagon finds. Hexagon Newsroom, 10 March 2026. Read the study →