The Czech Play That Gave Us the Word ‘Robot’
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
The cancelled Catholic intellectual E Michael Jones points out that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley may have been afflicted by guilt over the suicide of Harriet, Percy Shelley's estranged wife. Frankenstein's monster became an object that guilt. Similarly, in Aliens, the monsters represent guilt over growing sexual licence and abortion, he suggests.
If true this sort of thing may explain why the monsters are typically extremely powerful, can break through steel doors, etc. One cannot escape from them just as one cannot escape from a guilty conscience.
So our ideas about robots may say more about us than about robots. It would be a shame if psychological baggage were to hamper the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). It would mean that science fiction has primed us to reject the sub-creation of life merely because we project easily onto anything that resembles ourselves: even before it has come into existence.
This story is, I think, 400 years old?
It seems that humans have been distrustful about artificial beings since a long time, before they actually could have met them.
I believe Asimov has written that when he started writing his robot tales, one of his goals was to have robot stories that were not just Frankenstein stories, which he said were prevalent at the time.
Another favourite is of course Lieutenant Commander Data. His goal, rather than to destroy humanity, was to become more human himself. This is finally realised when he is presented with an 'emotion chip'.
Yet if neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms is correct it turns out that emotions are the foundation of all minds, i.e. Data could not have been emotionless to begin with.
See also Metropolis and many other works of art and fiction.
But I don't see one speculative theory about one author of one story (from centuries ago) as significant to a serious contemporary issue. It provides no evidence of the risks and the level of risk, nor an argument about them. Dismissing Mary Shelley, even if accepted, tells us nothing about whether AI can safely drive a car, make judicial decisions, decide whether you get a loan, or drop bombs.
The risk is perceived far beyond that story or older sci-fi, but widely anticipated by leading scientists and technologists of our day. What about their evidence and arguments? Nor is it hard to imagine risks with little thought.
> cancelled
Do we really need to inject reactionary politics into a discussion of AI? Does that further the conversation?
- The word "robot" (with its modern meaning) comes from a Czech play
- Tradition of Czech animation
- Tradition of puppetry
All these are about "animating" in the classic sense of the word, to breathe life into something.
Just kidding, but Golem might as well be one of the early Robot prototypes.
"Kaj ideš?" - "Do roboty." (standard Czech would be "Kam jdeš?" - "Do práce.")
And reading collections of old Silesian folklore from the villages, I noticed the rustic language having some extra features no longer present in Ostrava as well.
But the staccato accent is pretty much the same, yes. As is the preserved pronunciation of hard "y" which died out in standard Czech some 600 years ago.
An interesting exception is the region around Ostrava, where "y" remained a clearly different vowel in pronunciation until today.
Robota is more common in Slovak than in Czech.
That doesn't change the fact that the word "robot" in the meaning of artificial human was first used in R.U.R.
Thus the ironic power of the word's use in the play, the same irony that powers the motto 'Arbeit Macht Frei'.
And a related discussion from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25916140