The Origin of the Robot

Robots taking over jobs is the topic of this episode of The AI Minute. For more on Artificial Intelligence: https://voicesinai.com https://gigaom.com https://byronreese.com https://amzn.to/2vgENbn... Transcript: The earliest robots we know of in stories were mechanical creatures animated by magic, but by the time Frankenstein was published, science had mostly replaced the magic. By the time of the twentieth century rolled around, robots were completely creations of science. The word robot was coined in 1920 in a Czech play and is derived from a Slavic word for slavery. The robots in that play were manufactured using bio-mechanics, and they were designed to do whatever drudgery humans didn’t want to do. A human character in the play predicts something that sounds very much like the techno optimists of today say: “In ten years Rossum's Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything, that it will be practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor. Everybody will live only to perfect himself.” The robots souls were not crushed by this work because they were made without souls, or feelings, or passions of any kind. Eventually the humans stopped doing any work and let the robots do everything until the robots finally decided to take over and kill all the humans. So let’s hope this isn’t a case where life imitates art. http://bit.ly/2JZuely gigaom May 23, 2019 at 04:34PM