Between Karel Čapek and a Hard Brexit. Reflections on Robotics and Humanity
Between Karel Čapek and a Hard Brexit. Reflections on Robotics and Humanity

Summary/Abstract: Karel Čapek introduced the word robot to the languages of the world in his drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which premiered on 25 January 1921 at the National Theater in Prague. The word itself was coined by Karel’s older brother Josef, a cubist painter who created the stage-sets for the play. Etymology indelibly links robots with unfree labor, since robot comes from robota, the Czech word for the labor services Bohemian peasants owed their lords until 1848, when servile tenancies were abolished. A robot, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a machine with a human appearance or functioning like a human,” but the term has also come to be used inversely, to describe “a person who works mechanically and efficiently but insensitively.” [...]

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