The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself | Hacker News Reader

The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

spectrum.ieee.org

145 pointsjruohonen116 comments

I think it has been generally accepted that Josef Capek (Karel's brother) was actually the one who coined the word "robot". Karel Capek wanted to call them "labors" originally.

He could take solace in the fact that the Japanese later picked up on it: https://patlabor.fandom.com/wiki/Labor ;)

His robot was hijacked to mean a mechanical man with gears and wires inside and he objected to that. I'm thinking of course that the public only had experience with these things — or perhaps this was another fear of the time, the mechanization of jobs, and so the robot became the perfect avatar for this fear and so evolved.

But surely the idea of a mechanical man predates the term, robot. Automatons? Or is the distinction that people understood automatons as stationary, a parkour toy, while the robot was a next level thing capable of traveling. Or was the distinction that a robot might have a mechanical brain and so could carry out wanton destruction on it's own?

And was all this tied in with some creeping horror modern society saw in the machinery of The Great War?

The word "automaton" was coined to emphasize that the thing was inflexible. The word "robot" was coined to emphasize that it labored.

I don't think those were equivalent at first.

Yeah, most automatons were just novelities -- dolls that played music or drew a picture (just according to their mechanical "programming") rather than something that actually did useful work, let alone flexible work.

Yeah the idea of a “mechanical man” is as old as written history

Davinci even had a pretty thorough idea

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_robot

> But surely the idea of a mechanical man predates the term, robot. Automatons?

Greek myth has Hephaestus (Vulcan to the Romans) making a bunch of robots. Talos was a giant humanoid guardian of Crete made of bronze. I can't remember the names of his forge workers, but there were two of them and they worked with him pumping bellows and hammering metal.

Galatea is a marble statue which the sculptor falls in love with. The statue is then animated by Aphrodite.

"yay it's human" "oh no, it's too human" a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme.

I was curious about the assistants to Hephaestus you mentioned - apparently Vergil describes two cyclopes, Brontes (thunder) and Steropes (lightning), as helping him at the forge. Earlier myths about cyclopes describe three of them (Brontes, Steropes and Arges (brightness)), who predated the birth of Hephaestus and were credited with forging Zeus' thunderbolts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopes

DaVinci made the Automa Cavaliere in the Middle Ages, and there were some pretty complex clockwork dolls in both france and japan during the 18th century. if you go further back, there were some clockwork animal novelties used to entretain sultans and chinese emperors The materials change with the era, (earliest ideas involved wood, leather and ropes, modern age mechanisms are full of tin, copper, rare metals and wires and after the industrail revolution everything is iron and steel), but the fascination with making mechanical animals and men exists for as long as people could make relatively small devices do many different motions.

but in the past a complex mechanism needed to be as big as a water wheel or windmill and depended on a natural source of movement or someone constantly manipulating it to work. The industrial revolution and steam powered engines allowed for the same machines to run independently for hours. That's what changed fascination to a fear they might be "too independent" one day

It’s interesting that Philip K. Dick’s androids from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Replicants from the Blade Runner are way closer to Čapek’s robots than to mechanical humanlike contraptions. All three raise the same question — what is humanity, when you really get down to it?

Dildog posted a meme on this topic recently on Mastodon:

A group of monks sit around the Buddha.

Monk: Buddha, what makes us human?

Buddha: Selecting all images with traffic lights.

https://hackers.town/@dildog/111644483541067122

Sorry for an intellectually vacuous comment, but: Wow! Somehow this hit way harder than I was ready for!

Same here! Cross-pollination of ideas is one of my favorite aspects of the internet. Happy to be of service.

And the (non-Dick) movie sequel 2049 makes it even closer given how it is revealed that (some) replicants, just like some of Čapek’s robots, can become pregnant and give birth just like humans, allowing them to continue without humans manufacturing them.

When asking Google - what the etymology of the "robot" word is, the answer is from Czech word "robota" which is they translate as "forced labor".

While I don't speak Czech, I speak Polish which is a close cousin. For years it didn't occur to me that "robot" and the shortened "bot" words have slavic etymology. In Polish "robić" means to do (carry out, perform etc.) something. "Robię kawę" means "I'm making a coffee" and "Zrób coś" (imperative mood - do something!) is a call for action to take action. It's a popular multi-use verb.

"Robota" is a job or some work that one has to do, not necessarily forced as Google suggests.

Edit: Also adding another interesting fact. Golem is an inanimate entity from Yiddish folklore, with a story strongly related to a 16th Prague Rabbi. I looked it up on Wikipedia if there was any connection with the "Robot" and indeed there seem to be some - "The play was written in Prague, and while Čapek denied that he modeled the robot after the golem, many similarities are seen in the plot." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem)

I've always read that it came from "robotnik" which just means "person who is doing something". And I agree, I'm also Polish and "robota" does not imply forced labour in the slightest, maybe it does in Czech but I doubt it given the close similarity between languages. It's quite common for people to say "Idę do roboty" which just means "I'm going to work"(as in - my place of employment).

I'd translate "robotnik" as a "worker". A "person who is doing something" sounds a bit too general. Nevertheless, it's easy to guess that the root of the word is the same verb.

So “robota” would cover a personal or job-related chore and “robotnik” is a person performing such a chore?

In Polsh:

"Robotnik" means *manual* worker. E.g. someone fixing roads, or working in a factory.

"Pracownik" is a generic word for "employee". Can be an office worker or an manual worker.

"Robić" basically means "to do". While "pracować" means "to work". As you can notice one is more formal than another.

"Robota" is a less formal word, something closer to a "gig" (however it also means "work" or "job"). You will probably not find it in written texts. In writing "praca" (work) sounds more formal.

As a bonus, if you are a (manual) worker who complains and makes some not subtle digs about your job, you can say that you "have to go to your kołchoz tomorrow" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkhoz ). As the communist slogan said "work is your second home" after all :)

On a side note, do Czechs really like the polish word "pomidorek"? (Little tomato)

No, in Czech the meaning really is more specific and forced labor is not an overly bad translation, it's work done by serfs in medieval times. It can be used to describe any work as heavy, but that's either in joke, or when used by people geographically close to Poland (typically referring to mining).

Is there some historical reason for this?

I vaguely remember that in English, we have words like “cattle,” French etymology, and “cow” Germanic, and the speculation is that it is because the aristocracy were French for much of England’s history (so, the French word is used to refer to cows as a sort of abstract resource to be considered in bulk).

I believe it's a similar thing. Semi-educated guess based on historical facts: Because of various (not least religious) reasons, Czech-speaking intelligentsia pretty much ceased to exist mid-17th century (fact, replaced by German/Latin) and only actual serfs spoke Czech, work and robota became defacto synonym (speculation). And when it became fashionable and cool to speak Czech 100-200 years later for the city-dwellers (fact), they probably felt the need to differentiate whatever they were doing as a job from the definitely uncool farmers of the countryside (speculation).

The evolution is the other way around - the original meaning of that root in proto-Slavic was obligatory work, and that one in turn is a derivative of a PIE word with the same meaning.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/o...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

I'm Czech and while those two languages are close, "robota" is really forced work in Czech. What you called "robota" in Polish is called "práce" in Czech. In Czech, "Robota" is forced work and has bad connotations. See https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota . It's interesting that this page doesn't have Polish translation.

In the region where I was growing up next to Poland, we say "chodit do roboty" when describing normal work.

A lot of Czech people use this phrase in a very subtle, almost undetectable jest, but it is still fundamentally in jest. Drawing a connection between having to work for a living and likening it to being forced to work. It's similar to saying "Back to the salt mines" meaning back to work.

It cannot be helped if your práce feels much like robota. Which, granted, happens a lot.

I don't doubt that, you're probably from somewhere around Ostrava. There are of course regional differences. I'm from Brno and instead of "jít do práce" we usually used "jít do hokny", "jít do háčku", or just "jít makat". Whenever I hear word "robota", I connect it with my grand-grand-...-father who was forced to work ("robota") by "dráb" (overseer) and didn't like it. So he cut overseer's head with his scythe, became a village hero and founded a church there.

So I'm hard-wired to dislike "robota".

> So he cut overseer's head with his scythe, became a village hero and founded a church there

do go on, sounds like quite a story in there.

I did not expect to read hantec on HN today. Enough internet and about time for a škopek I guess.

Reminds of the Russian "chodit na rabotu".

Interesting that in Ukrainian робота and праця are synonymous. Although, some derived words are different in meaning. Like робітник is a worker but працівник is an employee. I see in another comment that the same is true in Polish.

It is similar in Polish. “Robota” as a colloquialism is used to denote tedious, unpleasant, and labor-intensive labor (literally manual labor), and it has a coarse connotation, so it is often used in jest (“wracać do roboty” is something like “back to the salt mines”).

The typical and more genteel way to refer to work is “praca”. “Szukam pracę” is how you would typically say “I’m looking for work”, for example [0]; “ciężko pracuję” means “I work hard”. So while “robotnik” is better understood as specifically a manual laborer or someone of the working class, “pracownik” means something like “employee”.

[0] I am aware of the Czech false cognate “šukat” :).

Etymologically Czech is the most conservative here. In other Slavic languages and in Proto-Slavic the original meaning was also forced/compelled labor (hence also why "rab" or "rob" means "slave" and not "worker" in most East and South Slavic languages). It just happened to evolve into a generic term meaning "labor" because the forced/compelled kind was so widespread and normalized.

Slavic languages aren't the only ones with such a trajectory for the term - the German "Arbeit" is directly related and underwent a similar process.

I would say that in Polish “robota” has a similar connotation. And “robol” describes a kind of low-level grunt. It’s definitely pejorative. “Praca” is the typical way to talk about work.

In Russian, работа simply means "work" or "job" without any negative connotation.

Yet "раб" is translated as "slave"..

In Bulgarian, a slave is „роб”.

Same with Polish, but in Czech where the word originates from, there is a difference and normal work is called "práce" not "robota" which is reserved for forced labor or as an in-jest name for work.

In Slovak, robota is apparently more like in Polish, it's commonly used to mean a job, sometimes as manual work, only historically for forced labour.

Russian isn't Czech and there are a lot of false cognates between the two.

These aren't false cognates though, they're actual cognates. Cognates can have different meanings. You might be thinking of 'false friends'.

My absolute favorite false cognate is 'arraigned' (English) vs. 'araignée' (French).

Arraignments would be far more nervewracking if they significantly involved spiders.

I like vonet and pachnout

Interestingly, the Chernobyl liquidators forced to clean the roof were referred to as robots. I think the TV series expanded that to "bio robots", but books about the incident from tbe nineties simply used robot.

> "Robota" is a job or some work that one has to do, not necessarily forced as Google suggests.

This is a popular misconception among speakers of other slavic languages, but the Czech word "robota" really does refer to forced work performed by feudal serfs: https://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=robota

Yes, robota has a different meaning in Czech (mandatory work performed by serfs for the benefit of their landlord) than in eg. Slovak or Russian where it means simply "work". Cf. Slovak phrase "Idem do roboty".

Btw Rossum in “Rossum’s Universal Robots” means "Reason".

In Czech, "robotnik" meant "serfs" and "robota" was the work that the serf was forced to do. Of course, nowadays, "robota" took the meaning of "a job" but that is not relevant to the etymology of the words.

We don't know when the word took on a new meaning though, serfdom in Austria Hungary was abolished 70 years before "robot" was first used

Speaking of Slavic etymology and robota, "slave" is derived from "Slav".

slave (n.) c. 1300, sclave, esclave, "person who is the chattel or property of another," from Old French esclave (13c.) and directly from Medieval Latin Sclavus "slave" (source also of Italian schiavo, French esclave, Spanish esclavo), originally "Slav" (see Slav); so used in this secondary sense because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave

The first part makes sense, the second one doesn't: where would that 'c' come from? No such thing as Sclavic people, never was.

Nevertheless, I'm not sure if there is any reflection on the fact that mediterranean pirates (and nomadic tribes further east) plundered Balkans for captives and southwestern europeans then bought them. And that, perhaps, was a suboptimal way to behave.

> No such thing as Sclavic people, never was.

Sounds like there was to the Greeks:

Slav (n.) "one of the people who inhabit most of Eastern Europe," late 14c., Sclave, from Medieval Latin Sclavus (c. 800), from Byzantine Greek Sklabos (c. 580), from a shortening of Proto-Slavic sloveninu "a Slav"* -- https://www.etymonline.com/word/Slav

It's not just the pirates, and not just Balkans, but also e.g. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Crusades

As for why there's a "k" there - Greeks would naturally adapt any foreign word to the phonotactics of their language, which does not have "σλ" as a valid syllable onset, but does have "σκλ".

Indeed, which is interesting, because “Slav” comes from the word for “speech” or “word”. In Polish, for example, “word” is “słowo”, whereas “Slavs” is “słowianie”. Germans are “niemcy” from “niemy”, meaning “mute”. So to be a Slav meant to be intelligible and able to speak, whereas Germans were unintelligible or “mute”. Compare this to “barbarian”, from the Greek, which comes from the sound of the unintelligible speech of foreigners to the Greek ear (“barbarbar”, almost like “blah blah blah”).

It's not derived, it's used - first by defeated.

> It's not.

How is it not?

One of your other comments sounds like you agree with the etymology jefftk cited? But that says the exact same thing. The word slav was first, and the word slave was made from it.

Something being "propaganda" and "revenge" does not stop it from being the origin of a word.

Edit:

Oh, you elaborated slightly. > It's not derived, it's used - first by defeated.

That's what derived means. They took a word and used it to make a new word.

the other word is used in such way only as sounds similar to the second but has different meaning

That's nonsense, not true and a libel. That words are INDEPENDENT: slave doesn't mean faming, people names: Bogusław mean Godfaming - not slave of god, Mieczysław mean Swordfaming - not slave of sword.

It is sort of funny that when shortening it in English, we ended up with “bot,” dropping the “ro,” which looks like the more important part of the word.

I'm betting it's because Rob as a shortened version doesn't work.

I’ve heard this shortening by Russians also American English “robo” was common

Wouldn't be the first time. The English word "bus" is derived from a neologism "omnibus", "for all" (as in, "carriage for all") invented to describe the first attempts at mass transportation using horse carriages. In that word, "omni-" corresponds to "all", and "-bus" is just a suffix indicating dative declension of a plural noun.

In various Discworld books, Pratchett sort of unified Golumns with Asimov’s three laws robots.

In Bulgaria, we use "работа" (rabota) but eventually adopted "robotya" as a slang for working hard as a robot.

Man, I really should travel more around Europe. COVID ruined my last planned vacation and I've stayed at home since then.

As your neighbor from the North (Romania) I highly recommend visiting the general Central and Eastern European area.

In the last few years we’ve been to Prague, short stay in Vienna, Bratislava, Ohrid (spent a night in Pernik on the way there, which I count as part of the experience) and I’d also put Athens and Southern Greece/the Peloponnese on the list (even though it’s not Eastern nor Central European). All very interesting and beautiful places in their own way (yes, even Athens), I highly recommend them.

all good recommendations. I needed some encouragement. Thank you.

It's blowing my mind you willingly went to Pernik, though.

I wonder when the english (at least American english) pronunciation of robot changed? I sometimes listen to old radio dramas as I fall asleep and the older the show the more likely they are to say "row butt" instead of "row bot."

Isaac Asimov used to say "row butt" but I can't think of anyone else who did/does.

The narrator on many episodes of How It's Made says "row butt"

For example here is an episode of the shohw 2000 Plus from 1950-52 where in the first few seconds the woman says row butts. https://youtu.be/L1EDCwU7sJI?si=M3tHqG33Y1agVW4r

Correction, as the sibling post pointed out, Zoidberg does this as well, maybe it's a (New York) Jewish thing?

When I think about old fashiony ways to pronounce robot, the only thing i think of is Zoidberg pronoucning it "rowbit" https://youtu.be/mh5NSmVs_uk?t=26

I know more than a few people who pronounce it "row butt" today. I think it's a regional US dialect thing.

One of the first twilight zone tv episodes, maybe even the first one, featured that pronunciation also.

R.U.R. is always worth a (re)read.

Standard Ebooks has a CC0 copy: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karel-capek/r-u-r/paul-sel...

Sorry, correction (not sure what I was thinking), this is a PD-in-the-US edition, not a CC0 edition. It is also PD in death-plus-70 regions.

Another irony is Capek did not really liked R.U.R. He was great author and journalist, read his War with the Newts (1936). RUR was his early theater game, it is a bit silly and has big plot holes.. Yet somehow it is his most known work.

War with the Newts is wonderful, though The Absolute at Large is also worth of attention :)

In Hungary we've learn about robot "jobs" in school. I am no expert but in serfdoms the peasants, who owned fields, had to work on the field of the lords for free. [1] I could only found the hungarian wiki page: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igás_robot We have used the exact word "robot" in hungarian.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

It was cool to find references to Čapek in Des Ex: Mankind Divided that takes place in Prague.

> when he recently read that, in Moscow, they have shot a major film, in which the world is trampled underfoot by mechanical robots, driven by electromagnetic waves

I wonder what's the IMDB id of that...

Pretty sure it's this: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0240539/

Has a Wikipedia page with the full movie embedded! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_Sensation

Was the title automatically editorialized? The article clearly says it's "The" man who coined the word "Robot"

HN does this. Just yesterday there was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078539

Despite a policy of "use original titles", the HN software automatically mangles titles.

This is one of the more bizarre auto-editing of titles it does because of how pointless it feels.

"The man who" is established English convention. "A man who" is changing the meaning for the sake of it without producing a clearer title. The person is unambiguously defined, so the definitive article is entirely correct. If the person isn't one of a set of people to whom the description could apply, it makes no sense to use the indefinite article. If a title was, "The man who starts every day with steak and chips" then switching to, "A man who starts every day with steak and chips" feels correct, he almost surely is not alone in doing so.

In contrast, "A man who coined the word Robot", is not correct, it alters the meaning to suggest that someone else could also have coined the word.

HN also removes "How" from the start of titles which often destroys meaning too. That is explained as trying to "reduce clickbait" titles, but the effect is often to make the title nonsensical.

It's one of the many contradictions about this place.

I feels as if whoever set up this system hasn't truly understood the meaning that "The man who" conveys, and has attempted to force a version they see as "more correct" despite it producing nonsense.

I say go the Slavic route and lose all the articles; "Man who coined word 'Robot' defends himself"

Fits with the 'robot' theme

Man coins "robot", defends self

"robot" man self defends

Defensive "robot" coiner.

Coin Operated Boy: A Man, Da.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAnyYTjjhJ0 (Dresden Dolls singer is Amanda Palmer - A Man, Da)

"Robot"er defensive

go the Slavic route

полека, лампата!

Looks like it doesn't change all titles that start with "the", see e.g. these two from the current front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082552

So it only changes "the man" to "a man"? (And I'm guessing also "the woman" to "a woman"?)

I'm struggling to understand the reasoning here. Can someone give me an example of a title starting with "the man" which sounds excessively clickbaity, but "a man" fixes it? I can't think of one.

Now I'm wondering what other auto-editing rules HN applies. Is there a list somewhere?

Sometimes a human also fixes them afterwards.

https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/up-in-the-air-meet-the-...

> Up in the Air: Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

> Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

> The Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

> A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916974

You can edit the title of "a" submission when this happens.

My experience is that, if a moderator hasn't touched it, the title of a story remains editable throughout the edit window of the first two hours. It doesn't matter what automatic changes were applied to the title on submission; they are not reapplied when you edit.

I restore the original title if HN's software changes it poorly. When I look at /newest or even the front page, it seems few submitters do. Either they are unaware of the possibility, or they think it isn't allowed. (AFAICT, it is allowed as long as you don't use it to break the guidelines. Here is a recent comment by dang saying you can do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38993985.)

IMHO, the "The" and "How" handling were smart decisions back during the digg era.

Over time those features of clickbait have become defocused. Removing The and How handling might make sense now.

> If the person isn't one of a set of people to whom the description could apply, it makes no sense to use the indefinite article.

> he’s the guy who (along with his brother Josef) invented the word “robot.”

Just to be superly, unnecessarily pedantic: in this case the person is one of a set of people, so although I don't agree with the title being rewritten, it does actually make sense.

This is one of the more bizarre auto-editing of titles it does because of how pointless it feels.

Someone should take a page from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and create an AutoGPT "replicant" version of HN, including LLM versions of the moderators, PG, and the top commenters and submitters.

Of course, in light of Betteridge's law, that version would be called Androids Don't Dream of Electric Sheep.

> whose research interests arguably make her one of the most qualified people to write about Čapek’s perspective on robots. “The chemical robots in the form of microparticles that we designed and investigated, and that had properties similar to living cells, were much closer to Čapek’s original ideas than any other robots today,” Čejková explains in the book’s introduction

This doesn't sound right at all. The play's about synthetic humans taking over from humans and falling in love, not tiny chemical robots.

Keep reading to the extract from Čapek himself. The primary thing that he emphasizes about his robots is that they were biological in nature, and the primary thing he disliked about where they went from there is that robots became a word that referred to mechanical technology. The scale of the robots didn't matter to him as much as the fact that they specifically were not mechanical.

Possibly that's because the scale wasn't changed. If you can imagine the plot being less changed by microscopic chemical (not biological even) machines than by the human-sized and shaped things being made of metal, not organics, then fair enough, but I can't.

Tag with (1935) ??

Quite an interesting short read and I guess a prompt to actually read R.U.R

It is an enjoyable story. My copy is a double edition with War with the Newts, which i think is actually better, if not as prophetic. Yet.

I recommend seeing the play if you have the chance. It's a great experience, with a lot of relevance to the current day.

The article is an excerpt from a book published in 2024, even if its subject is history.

So a tag with an old date would not be appropriate.

dang, can we change the title back to the original. This article is about "the man who the word robot" not "a man who coined the word robot". I know that often "the man" is used for clickbait purposes. Here it is just being accurate and to the point. The title being used now suggests that many people have coined the word robot which is untrue.

Mods don't get pinged when you use their name, to raise an issue you'll want to click Contact in the footer.

Yes, fixed now. But I only saw this by accident, and rather late in the day! As lolinder said, the only way to get guaranteed message delivery is hn@ycombinator.com.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com