Robotic centenary – 100 years since ‘robotic’ made its debut

Robotics remained at the vanguard of know-how improvement in 2021, but it was 100 years earlier in 1921 that the phrase robotic (in its fashionable sense) made its public debut. Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Common Robots) imagined a world by which humanoids referred to as ‘roboti’ have been created in a manufacturing facility. Karel’s brother, the artist and author Josef Čapek had first coined the time period robotic earlier than Karel adopted it for this theatrical imaginative and prescient.

The Slavic root of the phrase is even older and even its first identified look in English dates again almost 200 years. In the course of the time of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, robotic referred to a type of pressured labour much like slavery. In Čapek’s play, the roboti have been being manufactured as serfs to serve human wants.

These days we might see Čapek’s creations extra as androids somewhat than robots within the fashionable sense. Nonetheless, the result of the play, with the robots rebelling towards the people and taking on the world, has since turn out to be a trope of science fiction which persists to this present day. And but the meant message in Čapek’s play wasn’t concerning the inherent dangers of robots however of the dehumanising risks of rampant mechanisation. We all know that common tradition has taken a unique studying from the play, in fact, with robots on display and in print extra prone to be forged because the unhealthy man, though there are some notable exceptions, too. It’s attention-grabbing to surprise how completely different the mainstream picture of robots is likely to be right now if Čapek’s play had positioned his roboti and their homeowners in a extra mutually benevolent relationship.

Čapek’s robots first appeared on the display in a BBC tv manufacturing of R.U.R. in 1938. Three years later the phrase ‘robotics’ was first used as a time period for the sphere of analysis and know-how that develops and manufactures robots. Like ‘robotic’ in its fashionable sense, ‘robotics’ additionally has its origins within the inventive creativeness, because of a person who was born in the identical 12 months that the Čapek brothers have been bringing the trendy ‘robotic’ into the world. Science fiction author Isaac Azimov famously coined his three legal guidelines of robotics, which proceed to resonate in discussions concerning the moral use of robots, in 1941. By the way, Azimov wasn’t a fan of the play itself however his legal guidelines have been designed exactly to stop the form of tragedy imagined in Čapek’s play.