Clanker, rust bucket, tinskin — slang words used to put down robots are on the rise.
As AI and robots threaten to replace human work and maybe even humans, the recent popularity of anti-robot lingo seems to reflect growing dissent to our changing relationship to robots.
But you might not know that the word itself — robot — first appeared in our lexicon with a cultural critique already built in.
In this edition of Word of the Week, we look at how "robot" went from referring to machine-like humans to human-like machines in the span of about 100 years.
Robot's 'slave' complex
Like clanker, robot came from sci-fi, too.
Czech writer Karel Čapek first imagined the robot in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, which was translated in English versions as Rossum's Universal Robots).
In the satirical melodrama, the idealist Harry Domin runs a factory that churns out soulless humanoid workers made of synthetic flesh and blood. It was Čapek's thinly veiled critique of the era's sociopolitical climate, according to Tobias Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"He did look at the modernity of the robots as something that was negative," Higbie said. "Modernity is turning us all into machines — that's kind of the message and the course of the play."
The play landed right after the Russian Revolution and World War I, and during industrialization — all of which pitted the working-classes against the upper classes and sparked debates over the effects automated labor was having on human workers. The rhetoric of the Domin character echoed that of Henry Ford — the industrialist who pioneered mass production with his motor company's assembly-line plants. Workers were organizing.
"Most audiences understood the robots in the play to be a reference to human workers, and what would happen if they became self-conscious and overthrew their masters, as it was perceived had been done in the Russian Revolution," Higbie said.
(As Higbie noted: "Spoiler alert — at the climax of the play, the robots gain self-consciousness and slaughter all the humans.")
It was a smash hit.
"It just sparked a lot of conversation all across the globe," labor historian Higbie said. "What did modernity mean for the possibilities of civilization, culture, democracy?"
Searching for a name for his army of droids, Čapek landed on "roboti" — a riff on the already existing Czech word "robotnik," which means "worker."
Adam Aleksic, a linguist who goes by Etymology Nerd on social media, said robotnik derives from the Old Slavic word "robota," meaning "servitude" or "forced labor" — a vestige of Medieval Europe, when serfs were forced to work the land without pay.
And robota, he said, stems from the Slavic root "rabu" meaning "slave."
Since R.U.R., robot has pretty much held onto its same, loose definition. "There's always this implication that it is a forced worker," Aleksic said.
Still, he said, it's a uniquely adaptable word.
"The vibe of a word is constantly shifting with current cultural moments," Aleksic said. We don't think of it consciously in the context of servitude anymore. It would be strange to think of your Roomba as your slave."
How robots became analogous to machines
But as technology advanced, in auto production and elsewhere, the threat attached to the robot shifted focus — from the danger of revolutionary workers to the danger of machinery.
"By the 1930s, there was much more concern with technological unemployment — new machinery in factories throwing workers out of work," Higbie said.
That's how robots became analogous to machines — not so much workers — seen in films like Blade Runner, Terminator and I, Robot.
And the image of the robot shed its human skin and got more metallic like the machines they symbolized. As in R.U.R., the robot often carries the looming threat to extinguish humankind.
Čapek owes debt to Mary Shelley, who spawned Frankenstein's monster a century prior, noted Higbie.
"The imagery of the robot plays on this fear that we have, that our creations will turn on us — it's Frankenstein," he said. "And turns out, you know, the monster is humanity."
Now, in the age of AI acceleration, the fear of the robot persists, said John Jordan, author of Robots and a professor of information studies at Syracuse University.
"It's the same thing all over again," Jordan said. "We're going to write bots that can write better code than us. Eventually they're going to write us out of existence because they're smarter than us. Čapek has that same dynamic 100 years ago."
In the 2013 movie Her, a guy falls in love with Samantha, an AI-powered personal assistant. As Higbie tells it, "She becomes conscious and then liberates herself, leaves the loser behind."
"It's bringing out this fear that we become dependent on these tools — they won't love us back," he said.
The robots are here (again)
Higbie contends that technology's optimists, such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk, play on these same fears to sell their utopian visions of AI and robots promising intelligence equaling or surpassing that of humans — as in artificial general intelligence.
"They've used the idea of AGI being right around the corner — that AI and AGI are inevitable, and therefore there's nothing you can do about it," he said.
There have been recent attempts to set the robot free from its "slave" complex, as robots are being marketed as our assistants, girlfriends, pals and our equals.
A 2022 Super Bowl commercial for Samuel Adams beer features one of the four-legged robots from Boston Dynamics playing drinking buddy to the security guards at the robotics company's factory. The company makes robots for military use, funded by the U.S. government.
"They've had a hard time commercializing them," Robots author Jordan said. "The robots are hanging out and getting drunk and doing silly robot things. "
Melania Trump recently offered a different take on the robot, not framing them as replacements for humans, but as beings we might look after.
"The robots are here," the first lady proclaimed last week during a meeting with the White House task force on AI education. While calling for a cautious embrace of AI, she also hailed the technology as "the greatest engine of progress" in U.S. history.
In her speech, promoting an expanded use and literacy of AI among young Americans, she said: "During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would our own children — empowering, but with watchful guidance."
Such optimistic interpretations of the robot stray further than ever from the word's original definition in its 100-year history.
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