![]() ![]() What did happen was that the robots are now used by a very select group of people for their own purposes, while the rest of the people have no saying over how these robots are used. That did not happen, not so far, and it probably never will. ![]() Karel Čapek was the first to warn that robots might rise up against us one day and make us their servants. Especially when we don’t really know who these suspects are, what we are really talking about is murder. Killing people who are suspected of something from flying robots, for example. But it makes no sense whatsoever for many other things for which it is employed as a cheap and seemingly effective solution. Or manufacturing of medications or of just about anything else. What one can call robotization, or the use of non-thinking machines to replace thinking humans, makes sense to me for a lot of things. Although maybe he should be more selective about the roles he picks. ![]() #ROBOTIZE ME SERIES#Among my favorite movies on this subject is the classic Terminator series with the unforgettable Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the more recent Matrix series with the equally often ridiculed Keanu Reaves, who I think happens to be a very fine actor. Variations on the same theme have been later made use of in hundreds of sci-fi novels and dozens of movies. In Russian, “ rabota”, means simply “work”, and the Slavic root word is also related to the German word “ Arbeit”, which again means simply “work”.Īt the end of Karel Čapek’s play, a rebellion of hostile robots leads to the extinction of the human race. Although cognates of the word “ robota” exist in many Slavic languages, it means different things in different languages, as is typical of false cognates ( faux amis) in related languages. The word “robot” is derived from the Czech word “ robota” which means “serf’s labor” and it is related to the Slavic root of the word “ rab”, which means “serf” in archaic Czech and “slave” in Russian. #ROBOTIZE ME TV#I read just about everything that Karel Čapek wrote many years ago when I was a teenager, and I saw most of his plays, either on TV or in theater, including “Pictures from the Insects’ Life” (a play in which ants and other insects act in ways that are remarkably similar to ours, mostly by killing each other en mass), the White Disease (an allegory for fascism), and R.U.R. It is interesting to me that the following three words that have been borrowed from Czech, or from what is now called Czech Republic, became English words: pistol (from píšt’ala, which now means “flute” or “whistle” in Czech), dollar ( via German from a place in Bohemia called in German Joachimsthall, the origin of silver coins that were called “ tolars” in Czech, very popular in Europe about four hundred years ago), and the word “robot”, which made it into English in its original spelling.īy a strange coincidence, a combination of the words pistol, dollar, and robot would nearly perfectly describe the current state of our modern human civilization to a curious visitor descending from a UFO and uttering the immortal words “Take me to your leader.” It is likely that the word was suggested to him by his brother, Joseph Čapek, after Karel Čapek attempted to coin a new word for his new play from the English word “labor” (or “labour”, probably). The word “robot” was created by the Czech writer and playwright Karel Čapek in 1921, almost a hundred years ago, for one of his science-fiction plays called R.U.R., which stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots. ![]()
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