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It backwards: first common application of the technology gave it the name. Like in one of the Stanisław Lem's stories about Ijon Tichy people call intelligent

It backwards: first common application of the technology gave it the name. Like in one of the Stanisław Lem's stories about Ijon Tichy people call intelligent anthropomorphic robots washing machines.

matt4077 9y ago
You'll be delighted to hear that traffic signals are called "robots" in South Africa.
- malkia 9y ago
  That itself reminded me, that the word "robot" comes from "robota, rabota" which means "to work, worker" in a lot of slavic languages (My native language is bulgarian). From the dictionary: robot, origin: from Czech, from robota ‘forced labor.’ The term was coined in K. Čapek's play R.U.R. ‘Rossum's Universal Robots’ (1920). https://www.google.com/search?q=robot+definition https://www.google.com/search?q=robot+definition
  - contras1970 9y ago
    Rossum is a riff on "rozum" which means reason (as in to reason about). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.#Origin_of_the_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.#Origin_of_the_word
    - mrkgnao 9y ago
      "Thinker's Universal Workers"?