I blame the play Rossum's Universal Robots, published in 1920, in which robots launch a global rebellion and exterminate the human race.

If that poisonous piece of propaganda had never been published, then today everyone would probably perceive AI correctly as a benign and beneficial.

The Terminator didn't help either, but Cameron probably got the idea of robots hostile to humanity from Rossum's Universal Robots. How else would he have arrived at such an absurd conclusion?