How the word “robot” was reprogrammed to mean machine : NPR
A Boston dynamic robot is seen during a media tour at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant, Ellabell, Georgia, in March.
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Mike Stewart / AP
Clanker, rust bucket, tinskin – Slang words used to put robots are increasing.
While AI and robots threaten to replace human work and perhaps even humans, the recent popularity of anti-robot jargon seems to reflect an increasing dissent to our changing relationship with robots.
But you may not know that the word itself – robot – appeared for the first time in our lexicon with an already integrated cultural criticism.
In this edition of Word of the weekWe look at how “robot” has gone from the reference to humans similar to machines with human -type machines for about 100 years.
Complex “slave” of the robot
Like Clanker, Robot also came from science fiction.
Czech writer Karel čapek first imagined the robot in his 1920 play Rur (Rossumovi Univerzální Robotiwhich was translated into English versions by Rossum Universal Robots).
In the satirical melodrama, the idealist Harry Domin directs a factory that produces soulless humanoid workers in synthetic flesh and blood. It was the barely veiled criticism of čapek of the socio -political climate of the time, according to Tobias Higbie, professor of history and work studies at the University of California in Los Angeles.
“He considered the modernity of robots as something negative,” said Higbie. “Modernity transforms us all into machines – it’s a kind of message and the course of the room.”
The play landed just after the Russian revolution and the First World War, and during industrialization – which all opposed the working classes to the upper classes and triggered debates on the effects that automated work had on human workers. The rhetoric of the dominant character echoed that of Henry Ford – the industrialist who was the pioneer of mass production with the assembly factories of his automotive company. The workers organized themselves.
“Most audiences have understood that the robots of the play are a reference to human workers, and what would happen if they became aware and overthrew their masters because it had been done in the Russian Revolution,” said Higbie.
(As Higbie noted: “Spoiler alert – at the culmination of the play, the robots gain self -awareness and the slaughter of all humans.”)
A digitized page of 1922 volume of The prospects The magazine shows a scene from a production of theater theater of the play of the Czech writer Karel čapek RurPut in Frazee Theater, New York.
The prospects/ Tobias Higbie via Flickr
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The prospects/ Tobias Higbie via Flickr
It was a hit Smash.
“It just triggered a lot of conversations in everyone,” said the Higbie labor historian. “What did modernity mean for the possibilities of civilization, culture, democracy?”
In search of a name for its army of droids, čapek landed on “Roboti” – a riff on the already existing Czech word “robotnik”, which means “worker”.
Adam Aleksic, a linguist who goes through the Nerd etymology on social networks, said that Robotnik derives from the old Slavic word “Robota”, meaning “servitude” or “forced work” – a vestige of medieval Europe, when the serfs were forced to work the ground without salary.
And Robota, he said, stems from the Slavic root “rabu” which means “slave”.
From RurRobot has roughly preserved its same loose definition. “There is always this involvement that it is a forced worker,” said Aleksic.
However, he said, it is a unique adaptable word.
“The atmosphere of a word moves constantly with current cultural moments,” said Aleksic. We no longer consciously think of it in the context of servitude. It would be strange to consider your roomba as your slave. “”
How robots have become similar to machines
But as technology advanced, in automotive production and elsewhere, the threat attached to the robot changed its concentration – from the danger of revolutionary workers to the danger of machines.
“In the 1930s, there was much more concern with technological unemployment – new machines in factories throwing labor workers,” said Higbie.
This is how robots have become analogous to machines – not so many workers – seen in films like Blade runner,, Terminator And Me, robot.
And the image of the robot has lost its human skin and became more metallic like the machines they symbolized. As in RurThe robot often carries the imminent threat to extinguish humanity.
Čapek owes debt to Mary Shelley, who generated the Frankenstein monster a century earlier, noted Higbie.
“The imaging of the robot plays on this fear that we have, that our creations will turn to us – it is Frankenstein“He said.” And it turns out, you know, the monster is humanity. “”
Now, in the era of AC acceleration, fear of the robot persists, said John Jordan, author of Robots and information teacher at the University of Syracuse.
“It’s the same thing again,” said Jordan. “We are going to write robots that can write better code than us. In the end, they will write to us because they are smarter than us. Čapek has the same dynamic 100 years ago.”
In the 2013 movie HerA guy falls in love with Samantha, a personal assistant powered by AI. As Higbie says, “she becomes conscious and then frees herself, leaves the loser behind.”
“It brings out this fear that we become dependent on these tools-they will not love us,” he said.
The robots are there (again)
Higbie argues that the optimists of technology, such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk, play on these same fears to sell their utopian visions of AI and robots promising equal intelligence or exceeding that of humans – as in general artificial intelligence.
“They used the idea that AGA is going fast-that AI and AG are inevitable, and therefore you can do nothing about it,” he said.
There have been recent attempts to release the robot from its “slave” complex because the robots are marketed as assistants, friends, friends and our equals.
An advertisement of the Super Bowl in 2022 for Samuel Adams Beer offers one of the four -legged robots of Boston Dynamics playing Drinking Buddy at the security guards of the Robotics Company factory. The company manufactures robots for military use, funded by the United States government.
“They had trouble marketing them”, ” Robots Author Jordan said. “The robots drag and get drunk and make silly robots.”
Melania Trump recently offered a different vision of the robot, not supervising them as replacements for humans, but as beings, we could take care of.
“The robots are there”, the first lady proclaimed last week During a meeting with the White House working group on AI education. While calling for a prudent AI embrace, she also praised technology as “the biggest engine of progress” in American history.
In her speech, promoting a widened AI use and literacy among young Americans, she said: “During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would do our own children – stimulating, but with vigilant advice.”
Such optimistic interpretations of the robot move away more than ever from the original definition of the word in its 100 years history.
