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

Robotics remained at the vanguard of know-how 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 through which humanoids referred to as ‘roboti’ had 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 2 hundred years. Through the time of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, robotic referred to a type of compelled labour just like slavery. In Čapek’s play, the roboti had 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 trendy sense. Nevertheless, the end result of the play, with the robots rebelling in opposition to the people and taking on the world, has since change into a trope of science fiction which persists to this present day. And but the supposed 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 widespread tradition has taken a distinct studying from the play, after all, with robots on display screen and in print extra more likely to be solid because the dangerous man, though there are some notable exceptions, too. It’s fascinating to marvel how totally different the mainstream picture of robots is likely to be at present 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 screen 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 sector of analysis and know-how that develops and manufactures robots. Like ‘robotic’ in its trendy sense, ‘robotics’ additionally has its origins within the artistic creativeness, due to a person who was born in the identical yr that the Čapek brothers had 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 had been designed exactly to forestall the form of tragedy imagined in Čapek’s play.