EXTINCTION by robot isn't an appealing proposition, but this home security droid is bringing us one step closer.

Human beings have always been in the game of predicting their own demise. Few civilisations in our chequered history have come and gone without developing some kind of fatalistic prophecy about the time and means of man's ultimate destruction, be it at the hands of gods, of beasts, of pestilence or even of himself. It's an entertaining hobby that persists to this day, spiced up significantly by the broad range of exciting 21st century dangers threatening to push us into extinction.

And they're not all bad. We like the sound of global warming, with its rich promise of converting dreary Britain into a sun-drenched tropical paradise. Nuclear war could be also quite an adventure, forcing us to repopulate the Earth with a ragtag bunch of hardened survivors, scrounging tinned food from dead supermarkets, zipping around the world on motorbikes and forming some unforgettable friendships.

But there's one doomsday scenario we're not so keen on, and that's death by robots. When the human race finally pops its collective clogs, there's every chance that the harbinger of said demise will be the cold, calculating, soulless brain of the machine. We may lord over them now - putting them to work in our factories, placing their primitive logical behaviour strings inside our videogames to emulate humans at war, turning them into toys for our young to experiment and play with - but one day it's all going to go horribly wrong. Some computer, somewhere, will decide that humans are a canker on the forehead of peace and progress and the next morning you'll wake up being bludgeoned to a pulp by your microwave. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Which is why we're more than a little scared by the WowWee Rovio. The company that created the Robosapien - a small mechanical biped that totters round your house for the sick entertainment of your children - has unveiled a shoebox-sized home patrolling robot that you can pilot by proxy via a PC or mobile phone. Billed as a home security device, Rovio looks like a cross between a tortoise and a vacuum cleaner, boasts a little camera to show you where it is, relays voice chat from you to anybody standing near it and learns the layout of your home so it doesn't crash into things.

Most importantly, it represents another hurdle overcome in the machines' secret race to kill us all. In the fast paced world of robotics, today's user controlled camera is tomorrow's autonomous AI controlled high powered rifle. Tick tock, human race.