What the heck is a “robot” anyway?
May 21st, 2008 by Mr RoboticsI wrote this for Servo magazine – the magazine about robots that you should be subscribing to.
In 1921, Karl Čapek wrote the play Rossum’s Universal Robots, thus coining the term “Robot” (ok, technically it was his brother Josef who amended Karl’s original term from either the Latin laboři, or the Czech trudnik, but we won’t quibble. It was still Karl’s play.) In the play, they were not electro-mechanical humans. They were very much flesh and blood, manufactured in fleshy parts and later assembled. This very much follows the golum and Frankenstein mythos. And it is clearly the basis for follow-ups like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Blade Runner, BattleStar Galactica, and to an extent, zombie mythos. Ah, but language is ever so fluid, and the original intended Corpus Novum in the above tales has since been replaced by “clone” in modern usage. Yet we grandfather the word “robot” in on the above stories. But under Čapek’s original definition, none of us can call our creation a “robot.”
And now, we have so very many different opinions on what a robot is. Ask ten roboticists for a definition, and you’ll get fifteen answers.
