Did you know … The word robot was used for the first time in Prague in 1921?

It was on 2nd January 1921, in the then Czechoslovakia (today, the Czech Republic), where the word ‘robot’ was first introduced and used in public.

In 1920, Czech writer, playwright, and journalist Karel Čapek (1890 – 1938) first wrote the science fiction play R.U.R., which stands for Rossumovi Univerzalni Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robot). The original term ‘roboti,’ which was invented by Čapek, derived from the Czech word ‘robota,’ which means forced labour. Later on, the word 'robot' was added to the English language in 1923.

Since then, the word 'robot' has been widely used in both fiction and non-fiction. In both cases, referring to autonomous machines capable of performing jobs to help humans.

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From Prague, with Love

Considered one of the classics of twentieth-century theatre, the speculative fiction play R.U.R., was performed in three acts for the first time on 2nd January, 1921 at Hradec Králové (the National Theatre in Prague) in the then Czechoslovakia. The play is about artificial humanoid workers who are not mechanical but instead they are made of synthetic organic material and look exactly like humans. In Čapek’s play, each humanoid robot can do the work of several humans and thus humans can have more free time for enjoying life.

It doesn't take long for the humanoid robots to realise that despite having no passion, no history, no soul they are stronger, smarter, faster, and more capable than humans, yet, they are treated like slaves without too much consideration.

After this realisation, the robots rise up against their human masters and kill them all but one, leading to the extinction of the human race.

Karel Čapek’s play looks into a future in which all workers are automatons, or “robots” – a word this play introduced and made a permanent part of the language and human culture and society. In the play, robots revolt when their manufacturing formula is changed to make them more irritable and to give them the human ability to hate. The resulting catastrophe makes for a powerful and deeply moving theatrical experience. Yet, it carries a profound message.

In a scene at the end of the third act, one of the last remaining humans, knowing himself and his species to be doomed, says: “It was a great thing to be a man. There was something immense about it.”

Since then, the concept and narrative of man vs. robot and robots rising up against their human creators has been repeated in many other works of fiction.

The play’s profound impact on science fiction and popular culture is evident, as it laid the groundwork for countless fictional and non-fictional narratives for over a century exploring the relationship between humans and artificial beings.

As it has happened many times, what once belonged to science fiction transpassed to the realm of science and technology.

According to IBM, the first robot equipped with artificial intelligence was Shakey, developed by the Artificial Intelligence Centre at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) between 1966 and 1972.

Shakey was a pioneering mobile robot that integrated perception, planning, and problem-solving capabilities, enabling it to navigate and interact with its environment autonomously. This groundbreaking project marked a significant milestone in the integration of artificial intelligence and robotics.

Since then, artificial intelligence has gained significant attention in the field of robotics as the way to build an artificial neural network that gives human-like intelligent capabilities to robots and humanoids.

However, many believe that if humans make a slight error in the current developments of artificial intelligence and AI-embedded robots, more precisely in terms of deciding for or against embedding human emotions into robots, in the future, human masters could see R.U.R.’s plot become a reality.

Will this eventually happen at some point in the future? Only time will tell. For now, we can only hope that humans make the right decisions at the time of embedding advanced AI into robots.

If you are interested in reading an English translation of R.U.R by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair you can find it here below through Standard eBooks as a free download.

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