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

Robotics remained at the forefront of expertise growth in 2021, but it was 100 years earlier in 1921 that the phrase robotic (in its trendy sense) made its public debut. Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Common Robots) imagined a world wherein 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 practically 2 hundred years. In the course of the time of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, robotic referred to a type of pressured labour just like slavery. In Čapek’s play, the roboti have been being manufactured as serfs to serve human wants.

These days we’d see Čapek’s creations extra as androids reasonably than robots within the trendy sense. Nevertheless, the result of the play, with the robots rebelling in opposition to the people and taking up the world, has since grow to be a trope of science fiction which persists to at the present time. And but the supposed message in Čapek’s play wasn’t in regards to the inherent dangers of robots however of the dehumanising risks of rampant mechanisation. We all know that widespread tradition has taken a special studying from the play, in fact, with robots on display and in print extra prone to be solid because the unhealthy man, though there are some notable exceptions, too. It’s fascinating to marvel how completely different the mainstream picture of robots may be at the moment 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 expertise that develops and manufactures robots. Like ‘robotic’ in its trendy sense, ‘robotics’ additionally has its origins within the artistic creativeness, because of a person who was born in the identical yr 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 in regards to 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 forestall the type of tragedy imagined in Čapek’s play.