The concept is simple to you because cruise control is such a common feature in cars that you only notice its absence. You understand exactly what a cruise cont

The concept is simple to you because cruise control is such a common feature in cars that you only notice its absence. You understand exactly what a cruise control does and how to control one. Now consider being in the 1950s -- probably you had never even imagined the concept of a device that automatically regulated the throttle position of your car. And also imagine that your overall knowledge base was much less -- the average person of 1950s western civilization was exposed to much less information on a daily basis than the average person of 2018. One of the base definitions of the term "robot" is "a machine capable of carrying out a complex sequence of actions automatically". Given that definition, I hardly think that calling a cruise control a "robot" idiotic. But what we call robots are far more complex and integrate narrow AI, so our threshold for calling something a "robot" is much higher than what would have passed for a robot in the 1950s.