Robots in literature
Artificial humans and autonomous artificial servants have a long history in human culture though today's most pervasive trope -- robots developing self-awareness and rebelling against their creators -- dates only from the early 20th century.
The earliest examples were all presented as the results of divine intervention and include: The dry bones that came to life in the Book of Ezekiel (Chapter 37); three-legged self-navigating tables created by the god Hephaestus (Iliad xviii); and the statue Galatea brought to life by the prayers of her creator Pygmalion.
More recent humaniform examples include: the brooms from the legend of the sorcerer's apprentice derived from a tale by Lucian of Samosata in the 1st century AD, the Jewish legend of the golem created like Adam from clay and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. These tales include an indictment of human folly at presuming to take on the role of creator.
Notable mechanical representations of humans include the life-sized singing puppet Olimpia in the short story "The Sandman" by E.T.A. Hoffman in 1816 and a bipedal anthropomorphic mechanism in The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis in 1865. These examples are stories about human-controlled mechanisms without autonomy or self-awareness.
The modern "Robot"
The first use of the word Robot was in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (written in 1920; first performed in Czechoslovakia in 1921; performed in New York in 1922; English edition published 1923) [1]. In the play, artificial living beings, created from a chemical substitute for protoplasm, learn violence from their human creators, and revolt. The play ends on an optimistic, even spiritual note, as the artificial biology leads a male and female robot to fall in love and inherit the earth.
While Karel Čapek's play introduced the word "robot" into languages around the globe, he wrote a letter in reference to the Oxford English Dictionary etymology in which he named his brother, painter and writer Josef Čapek as its true inventor [2]. In an article in the Czech Lidové noviny in 1933, he also explains that he originally wanted to call the creatures "laboři" (from Latin labor). However, Karel found the word too bookish, and sought advice from Josef, who suggested to call them "robots". (The word, which is always capitalized in Čapek's play, derives from robota, which means "drudgery" in Czech and "work" in Slovak.)
The theme of robots has been picked up by science fiction writers and many volumes are focused on robots and their interaction with the human species. Of particular note is the work of Isaac Asimov a large part of whose work centered on robots. Asimov is particularly known for his creation of the three laws of robotics, which he explores in his stories. A modern type of robot used today is the computer.
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