The Computer History Museum in Mountain View actually has a number of home robots on display, which was cool because it was the first (and last?) time that I could see them in person.
There's something truly inspiring to a lot of kids about what engineers can build. Inspiring to me as an adult, too.
This is the source of much of our collective imagination about robots.
And all the dystopian movie plots about robots overthrowing humans and killing them all. I think that is completely projection - somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody." It really says a hell of a lot more about humans than robots.
For robots to take over the world or kill all humans, first they'd have to give a shit. They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. And have some motivations, akin to emotions, driving the behavior. Good luck on coding that up.
Not necessarily. All they need to have is a single minded goal of creating paperclips and optimizing for that.
Those robots wouldn't have to search very much on the internet to find out what happened to that Microsoft AI Twitter bot when it started to misbehave
Most of these, from the earliest, are various allegories about responses to exploitation and oppression not people thinking how they’d want to kill everybody if they were a robot.
(Important to note that, just like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep & Blade Runner, the 'robots' in R.U.R. are not mechanical devices but instead genetically engineered synthetic humans. That helps the metaphor a great deal: rather than being a pure 'other' whose behavior might be seen as a design error, it's simply a different breed or race of humans with different heredity that makes them convenient for othering, along with some argument about hereditary traits that supposedly make them more suited to hard labor.)
It's a made up word. If it translated to 'worker' he'd have just written 'worker' in Czech.
In all slavic languages, 'robot' is the base of the verb 'to work'. So, by the same means by which some people have decided to translate 'robot' as 'slave', it would be more accurate to translate it as 'worker'.