Two recent stories (and a lot of earlier ones I've read) have had to do with mankind's impending doom largely at its own hands, with Robots around to pick up the pieces: In Wall-E, it has to do with overconsumption, and Robots are our caretakers, and ultimately not so much our saviors as much as reminders of what's really important.
In Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, it is more of a mystery just why we died out, leaving an army of robots and barely inhabitable colonies on all of the planets of our solar system, partially terraformed: We wink out just as we're in mid-space age... but in this story, there are a lot of hints left behind that society had turned us into something not particularly NICE, and as more details come out about how the humans had used the sentient robots they had made, you're left with a bit of a "good riddance" feeling.
In both stories, these creatures we've made have somehow inherited more humanity than intended, and they're the carriers of our legacy.
In other stories I've read and seen, the arrival of sentience in a computer system leads to immediate destruction of our current way of life, either through the computer attacking us (Terminator, et al), or through a hyper-accelerated evolution leading to all of us being "uploaded" into a new consciousness (and the earth being dismantled for component parts for the great computer - called the Singularity - again, Stross, as well as Rudy Rucker).
It's interesting that there is so much pointing to the apocalypse, assisted by our technology... In Saturn's Children, it feels like a late Heinlein Romp (indeed, the racy cover and protagonist are clear nods to Heinlein's robot girl drama "Friday"), but gets deeper into examining the damage done when a society creates servants (or slaves) for their labor and leisure. Just as Wall-E's earthlings are unwitting prisoners to their leisure culture: Eventually, when you've got a thing with a brain and emotions catering to your every whim, you start to wonder, what's in it for the robot?
It just points to the fact that we do love our apocalypses, however they come. Nature's fury, alien attacks, Post Nuclear, Robot Uprising... and the newest genre - enslavement by leisure. I'm still very pro-technology, make no mistake, but I think I'd like to keep it pretty dumb and make my own sandwiches when I need them.
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A couple books - Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth, Dan Pinchbeck's 2012- Return of Quetzlcoatl - talk about these recurrences in our stories. Both available at library - Armstrong's quite scholarly and the latter combines mushrooms, crop circles, fairy tales and ets - lots of interesting things. We are telling certain kinds of stories because we are at a new Axial Age. Interesting, we were talking about this at dinner - everyone agrees that's why we are seeing so much rigidity in the existing structures (Pope Benedict's layers and layers and layers of lace, my word!) and the churches, politics, etc. Keep a light heart and a steady keel.
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