the.com/robots
tireless laborers built to free us, now competing for our jobs and our hearts
means Machines—often programmable and increasingly autonomous—designed to perform tasks for or instead of humans, ranging from factory arms to humanoid companions.
from From the Czech word 'robota,' meaning forced labor or drudgery (the kind a serf owed his lord). Playwright Karel Čapek introduced 'robot' to the world in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)—though he credited his brother Josef with actually suggesting the word. So the very name carries servitude baked in: these are, etymologically, our drudges.
- name origin
- From Czech 'robota,' meaning forced labor or serfdom
- first death
- A factory robot killed a worker in 1979
- surgeon hands
- Some perform surgery steadier than any human hand
- laws of fiction
- Asimov's three laws are pure storytelling, not engineering
- backflip masters
- Boston Dynamics machines parkour better than most people
boston dynamics atlas — humanoid robot that can run, jump, and perform backflips since 2016
fanuc m-10id — collaborative industrial robot used in manufacturing worldwide since 2011
sophia — ai-powered humanoid robot granted saudi arabian citizenship in 2017
roomba — autonomous vacuum cleaning robot with over 30 million units sold since 2002