Robots take over San Francisco's Ferry building in effort to ease automation anxiety

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- An invasion, of sorts, took place in downtown San Francisco.

A platoon of people masquerading as robots paraded through San Francisco city streets as part of an information campaign by ServiceNow, a Santa Clara-based cloud computing company.

According to the company, automation is an anxiety inducing buzzword that stems from the belief that labor-saving technology threatens jobs.

Last year, a Brookings Institute poll found that 52 percent of adult internet users believe that in the next 30 years, robots will have advanced to the point where they can perform most of the activities currently done by humans.

While automation will impact some roles, research doesn't support that version of a workplace without human workers.

ServiceNow decided to flip this dystopian view of the future with a display of robots commuting to work.

But they say this isn't really the future you should expect.

Alan Marks from ServiceNow says "The future of work is not about everyone being automated, and people going away in the office, but actually technology helping people work better."