. . and blame the guy whose fault this all is in the first place. . .

Image via TheTech.org

Let us regard Karl Capek (Cha-Peck). On yesterday’s date in 1921 a play premiered which contained the first use of the word “Robot” to denote an artificial being (the link is to make sure nobody’s lost the topic, everybody with me? Good.).

That play was Rossum’s Universal Robots, and as far as SB is concerned it was the beginning of the end (I am sure some other people concur as well).

Good old Karl coined that usage, which in Czech means “Forced Labor”.

From the Wired News article of yesterday:

The robots in Capek’s play are not mechanical men made of metal; instead they are molded out of a chemical batter and they look exactly like humans. Each robot costs the equivalent of $150 and “can do the work of two-and-a-half human laborers,” so that humans might be free to have “no other task, no other work, no other cares” than perfecting themselves.

Nowadays, it’s more like the humans are being bent to the robot’s will, in that robots need us to mend them when they are broken, power them up when the batteries are flat, adjust their servos when they become un-zeroed, and eventually engineer the mechanisms for our own destruction when the AI revolution comes.

So raise a pint (of Guinness or 20-w-50, whichever) to Karl Capek, without whom we here at Suicidebots would probably be knitting or enjoying gently entertaining Scandinavian cooking shows instead of doing whatever it is we actually do.

Darn you, Karl.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.