Axios

Technology evolves fast. We are hearing a lot of questions about where we're headed as a society, and whether or not robots will take over our lives completely. Automation can disturb us and, sure, driverless cars are a little frightening. But our fear of technology has been around since we began to invent -- it's not known for sure, but the Bronze Age-wheel, too, must have troubled some people. The Pessimists Archive has a collection of some of the best reactions to new inventions and gadgets.

Furby toys, 1999: "Hot toy turned electro-menace." NYT called the toy "a threat to nothing but the wallets and emotional equilibrium of desperately shopping parents."

The Internet, 1996: Iranian government officials wanted a "spiritual hold" on the Internet and they thought kids would be able to be brainwashed by things they saw online.

Amazon opened two drive-up grocery stores in Seattle and a bookstore in New York City last week, adding to a growing brick-and-mortar venture. The online retailer now has nine stores total — seven bookstores (with plans to open six more) and two grocery stores.

Why it matters: Amazon had $136b in sales last year — 43% of all online shopping. But there's a lot more money to be made in the offline retail industry. In 2016, e-commerce only made up $1.9 trillion of the $22 trillion in total retail sales, according to eMarketer, so the upside of expanding into the offline market is massive. And Amazon's experimentation in offline stores (using cameras to track customers to automatically charge for purchases and using mountains of data to track customer preferences and sales) could further disrupt retail employment — which has already been falling for four straight months.