Nuclear power plants, plane crashes, terrorism, school shootings, even some rare diseases (the mad cow disease led to the slaughter of millions of cattle, having killed in the UK less than 200 people cumulatively, whereas the flu can easily kill 10,000 people in a single year just in the UK).

I don’t think it has anything to do with technology and automation. People are just very bad at reasoning with probabilities. This is why lotteries are so popular. And it is fuelled by unscrupulous (and even less apt at grasping probabilities) media trying to make money out of sensionalist headlines. How many times a week am I told that x will cause the end of the world, replace x by flu pandemics, Ebola, global warming, cancer as a result of eating meat or using smartphones, etc.