ON APRIL 19th 2011, Skynet went berserk; two days later it began a killing spree and tried to enslave the human race. Such is the setting for one branch of the "Terminator" series, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a stoic robot sent to destroy (or protect, depending on which film) a lad destined to lead mankind to safety.

James Cameron, who dreamt up the series and directed the first two films, reminded the world of the special date on April 19th, when he tweeted: "Skynet was supposed to go operational tonight. Instead of machines taking over, we have the very real threat of global warming."

The series began in 1984, the year Apple introduced the Macintosh computer. Then, the date of Skynet achieving "self-awareness" was 1997. Later, it was pushed back to 2011, doubtless to make it feel suitably far in the future to be plausible (at least by Hollywood standards), yet sufficiently immediate to excite viewers. 

But the reality of technology is strikingly different to what was imagined three decades ago. Humans have been replaced by computer algorithms in many decision-making processes, from stock trading to medical diagnoses. Yet at the same time, robots of the sort beloved of science-fiction are some way off.

Japan, one of the most technically advanced places on Earth, watches some 500 people slowly poison themselves working at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which suffered a partial meltdown last month, because mechanical androids aren't capable of basic clean up. The best they have is a souped up vacuum cleaner by America's iRobot to relay video from inside the most radioactive parts of the plant.

What happened? To some, the future isn't what it used to be. But such disappointment stems from focussing on what modern technology is not, while failing to spot what it has, in fact, become. Robots exist all around us. They may not look like Maria, the voluptuous automaton in Fritz Lang's film "Metropolis" from 1927, or Robby from the 1950s television series "Forbidden Planet". Instead they take the form of advanced washing machines and factory equipment. (The Economist has argued recently that robots that are there could do with better management.)

At the same time, society has remembered that human beings don't need to compete with machines. Rather, they can stick to the sorts of tasks which continue to flummox robots. So computers help pilots to land planes, but passengers must adroitly handle the self check-in screens by themselves. 

A symbiosis has set in between man and machine. Amazon's Mechanical Turk farms out jobs that people can do more efficiently than computers. But this would be impossible without the internet to lower the costs of co-ordination and communications. Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, has made a career of cleverly capitalising on this notion. After coming up with the idea of having people type in a few hard-to-read letters to prove they were real and not spambots, Mr von Ahn invented recaptcha, which has them do the same thing—but with actual words from scanned books that computers can't decipher.

As with most things, today's technology is a mixed bag. Though IBM's Watson laid waste its humanoid rivals on "Jeopardy!", spurring technologists to croon that "the Singularity is near" (the "Singularity" being the moment when computers exceed human intelligence), people still can't get good mobile reception when it rains.

So, news of Skynet's capabilities may have been exaggerated. But worrywarts are adamant that it is not the prediction that has been proved wrong, merely the date. Society must not let down its guard, they exhort. Robots and Microsoft's "blue screen of death" are simply bidding their time. Or, as the Terminator himself might say: "I'll be back." We will see about that.