I have previously remarked that pop culture gives us clues as to what is haunting our collective unconscious, the state of the zeitgeist, or our psyche at any given time. In the early 1950s, soulless alien invaders became a kind of sci-fi proxy for the communist menace that was giving the McCarthy period the willies. Fear of the effects of the atom bomb soon populated our screens with mutant bugs, shrinking men and dozens of other instances of nature gone mad.

Ever since the computer and genomics began to assume central places in our lives, our TV and movies screens have been awash in robotic spookiness. Lately the nuts and bolts robots of yore have increasingly given way to bionic people, androids, cyborgs, cloned humans, genetically engineered creatures.

Ash in “Alien,” the Terminator, the Stepford Wives, the replicants of “Blade Runner” were early entries in what is now a crowded field. Much of this stuff is simply tired space opera with a few new trappings, but the quantity of it suggests we are increasingly aware that the machines are getting smarter and more powerful. Alongside them we begin to seem dumber, weaker, superfluous. It is no longer clear who is in control when the machines don’t just start taking our jobs but begin talking back to us.

When people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking begin saying aloud that they fear robots and artificial intelligence could in time pose a threat to human survival, it’s no wonder the rest of us begin to be uneasy. Perhaps the fevered imaginations of the script writers aren’t so fevered after all.

For years we’ve been warned about turning over too much power to our devices which are faster and allegedly less prone to irrationality or mood swings than us. HAL goes mad and sabotages a space mission in “2001,” Skynet in the Terminator mythos and Colossus in “The Forbin Project” are malign descendants of Gort in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Entrusted with too much latitude, they now control the world’s arms and assume dictatorial powers — for our own good. Resistance is futile.

Such fears seem less silly today, when we really have ceded control to the machines of stock markets, air traffic, utilities, and communications. When United Airlines, The Wall Street Journal and the NYSE were shut down by computer glitches on the same day last week, the first thing that came to mind were hackers or cyber-terrorists, but the next thought was that the machines themselves might be flexing their muscles.

Halle Berry is now dealing with human-alien hybrids and robotic offspring in “Extant.” Not a wild flight of imagination in a world where designer children are just around the corner and Japanese kids have artificial pets. In “Self/less” a dying rich man seeks to transplant his consciousness into a newer body he has paid to have made available, before its owner is ready to part with it. This is also plausible when there are two tiers of medical care for rich and poor and a lively trade in spare organs.

In “Ex Machina,” a robot sex worker/companion turns on her creator and seeks her freedom, which is merely a rewrite of the headlines with a device in the place of human victims of sex traffickers. And in “Humans,” it appears a slave revolt among the cyborgs may be imminent. This sort of scenario ought to worry the panjandrums of Silicon Valley. They aren’t counting on the self-driving cars or the internet of things unionizing and going on strike or simply refusing to take orders any longer. That would be really bad for business.

Perhaps this dissolving of the border between real life and science fiction, between made up stuff and everyday reality explains an ancillary phenomenon in the distorting mirror that TV and movies hold up to nature. More and more shows seem to be preoccupied with life and the afterlife.

If we are no longer living in the boring, familiar, suburban world of “My Three Sons” or even “Malcolm in the Middle,” but in a society worthy of Philip K. Dick, where we have our most meaningful relationships with Siri, send our kids not to school but to their iPad and don’t find true romance at the church social but hook-ups on Tinder, why not a world where the dividing line between natural and supernatural also begins to waver and dissolve.

So, a third of the population vanishes one day on “The Leftovers,” God knows why. Or a dome descends over a town from who knows where. Or people come back from the dead like Lazarus on “Resurrection” and the eerie French series “Les Revenants.” Or God takes an extended vacation, leaving angry angels in change in “Dominion,” or Armageddon is enthusiastically sought by a cult in “Dig.”

Alongside such scenarios, Islamic terrorists, cybercriminals and illegal aliens seem trivial. As the prophetic John Lennon sang 30 years ago: “There’s UFOs over New York and I ain’t too surprised. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, mama.”