This July, a new hotel in Nagasaki, Japan’s Huis Ten Bosch theme park will be opening the door to a slightly unsettling future. The hotel, which was announced on January 28, will be run exclusively by a staff of ten robots. Most of them are essentially just computers that you can talk to, but three of them are what are referred to as gynoids, which are humanoid robots of a female shape. Naturally, these gynoids are designed to look like young Japanese women. All of the robots, though, are able to make eye contact and respond to human body language.

The Henn-na Hotel is coming at an interesting time for Japan. As of recent, it’s become apparent that Japan is having a difficult time expanding its population. It has one of the twenty lowest birth rates in the world at 1.4 children per woman as well as anti-immigrant labor policies. During the time between 2005 and 2025, Japan may lose up to fourteen million workers out of its job force. To supplement the diminishing human labor, the Japanese have been using more than a million robots in factories to continue churning out products at an acceptable rate.

The introduction of robots like those used at the Henn-na Hotel, while being an interesting gimmick for a hotel, is also a glimpse into what could end up being the future for Japan and the world over. If trends continue in countries like Japan, we’re going to see a significant portion of the workforce disappear into retirement over the next thirty to fifty years. That work is going to go somewhere, and with the amazing technological advancements we’ve seen in the robotics industry over the past twenty years, it’s likely that it will end up picking up where people leave off. Is this what we really want, though?

All throughout time, people have always been wary of innovation and new concepts. We always assume we have the best available to us, so when a new concept comes along, we all kind of worry that it will be the death of us.

When electricity became readily available to the masses, people would cover their outlets when they weren’t in use because they were afraid that the electricity would seep out and kill them. In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s monster was brought to life with electricity. As people were afraid of electricity then, people today fear the rise of the robot.

We’ve seen it in seemingly hundreds of movies. Bloodthirsty robots, like the terminators or Wall-E, gain self-awareness and decide to turn on their human masters. The robots attack in an overwhelming manner, slaughtering gigantic portions of the human population or getting dirty tracks all over a human spaceship while hell bent on finding their friend Eve.

The robots that we’re seeing at the Henn-na Hotel and all throughout Japan could be precursors to advanced Artificial Intelligence, which scientists like Stephen Hawking warn could actually cause the death of humanity as we know it.

“Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete [with AI] and would be superseded,” said Hawking in an interview with the BBC.

Unlike electricity, which could not learn to sneak out of outlets and murder people, robots could eventually learn how to think for themselves and turn on us. Think HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. At first, he’s beating you in a game of chess, but before you know it, he’s trying to kill everyone on your spaceship.

Not everyone thinks like Hawking, though. Rollo Carpenter, creator of Cleverbot, believes that we will control computers and robots for a long time to come and that they can be used to solve many of the world’s problems.

Only time will tell. Hundreds of years from now, future generations could look back and laugh on our fears of robots. There’s also a chance that those future generations won’t even exist because humans were wiped out by robots long before. So, we could end up with Terminator’s Skynet, but we could also end up with the robots from I, Robot. Wait, no. Those robots were bad too. Perhaps we’ll get the AI from Tron. Oh, that one wanted to enslave humanity too. I know, we could all get Scarlett Johansson’s character from Her. That would be neat.