It’s interesting to watch the changes in design since robots were first introduced in the early 1900s, and also to revisit this part of the sci-fi universe. Maybe you’ve forgotten some of them already, or perhaps there are some you have never heard of.
Fun fact: The word “robot” was invented by Czech painter and writer Josef Čapek early in the 20th Century. The story goes something like this: Čapek’s brother Karel, also a writer, was working on a novel about a company that invents and manufactures sentient machines that look like humans. Karel was struggling to find a name for such a machine and intended to call it “labor” as it is the Latin word for... well... labor.
But Karel didn’t like the word. So he asked his brother. Josef told him, “Just call them ‘robots’,” as “robota” is a Czech word for heavy labor and originally it meant the work that serfs were obliged to do for free for their feudal lords.
That resulted in the famed novel “R.U.R.” (Rossums Universal Robots), which was published in 1920.
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