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The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself
- jruohonen 3y agoR.U.R. is always worth a (re)read.
- robin_reala 3y agoStandard Ebooks has a CC0 copy: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karel-capek/r-u-r/paul-selver_nigel-playfair https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karel-capek/r-u-r/paul-sel...
- robin_reala 3y agoSorry, 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.
- Almondsetat 3y agoWas the title automatically editorialized? The article clearly says it's "The" man who coined the word "Robot"
- moritzruth 3y agoHN does this. Just yesterday there was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078539
- xnorswap 3y agoDespite 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.
- jojojaf 3y agoI say go the Slavic route and lose all the articles; "Man who coined word 'Robot' defends himself" Fits with the 'robot' theme
- Y_Y 3y agoMan coins "robot", defends self
- Almondsetat 3y ago"robot" man self defends
- robertlagrant 3y agoDefensive "robot" coiner.
- pvg 3y agogo the Slavic route полека, лампата!
- arrowsmith 3y agoLooks 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=39066795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082552 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?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- badcppdev 3y agoTag with (1935) ?? Quite an interesting short read and I guess a prompt to actually read R.U.R
- twic 3y agoIt 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.
- derbOac 3y agoI recommend seeing the play if you have the chance. It's a great experience, with a lot of relevance to the current day.
- adrian_b 3y agoThe 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- js8 3y agoI 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- layer8 3y agoHe could take solace in the fact that the Japanese later picked up on it: https://patlabor.fandom.com/wiki/Labor https://patlabor.fandom.com/wiki/Labor ;)
- pawelwentpawel 3y agoWhen 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem)
- gambiting 3y agoI'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).
- pawelwentpawel 3y agoI'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.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoSo “robota” would cover a personal or job-related chore and “robotnik” is a person performing such a chore?
- JKCalhoun 3y agoHis 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?
- marcosdumay 3y agoThe 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.
- jhbadger 3y agoYeah, 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.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoYeah 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_robot
- 1-more 3y ago> 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.
- trusz 3y agoIn 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 https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igás_robot We have used the exact word "robot" in hungarian. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
- robertlagrant 3y ago> 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.
- lolinder 3y agoKeep 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.
- robertlagrant 3y agoPossibly 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Throw84949 3y agoAnother 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.
- ceceron 3y agoWar with the Newts is wonderful, though The Absolute at Large is also worth of attention :)
- thriftwy 3y ago> 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...
- romanhn 3y agoPretty sure it's this: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0240539/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0240539/ Has a Wikipedia page with the full movie embedded! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_Sensation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_Sensation
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoIt’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?
- aspenmayer 3y agoDildog 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 https://hackers.town/@dildog/111644483541067122
- neuromanser 3y agoSorry for an intellectually vacuous comment, but: Wow! Somehow this hit way harder than I was ready for!
- aspenmayer 3y agoSame here! Cross-pollination of ideas is one of my favorite aspects of the internet. Happy to be of service.
- jhbadger 3y agoAnd 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.
- shmerl 3y agoIt was cool to find references to Čapek in Des Ex: Mankind Divided that takes place in Prague.
- blendergeek 3y agodang, 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lolinder 3y agoMods don't get pinged when you use their name, to raise an issue you'll want to click Contact in the footer.
- dang 3y agoYes, 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.
- jccalhoun 3y agoI 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."
- UncleSlacky 3y agoIsaac Asimov used to say "row butt" but I can't think of anyone else who did/does.
- lajy 3y agoThe narrator on many episodes of How It's Made says "row butt"
- jccalhoun 3y agoFor 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 https://youtu.be/L1EDCwU7sJI?si=M3tHqG33Y1agVW4r
- UncleSlacky 3y agoCorrection, as the sibling post pointed out, Zoidberg does this as well, maybe it's a (New York) Jewish thing?
- madeofpalk 3y agoWhen 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 https://youtu.be/mh5NSmVs_uk?t=26
- JohnFen 3y agoI know more than a few people who pronounce it "row butt" today. I think it's a regional US dialect thing.
- tunesmith 3y agoOne of the first twilight zone tv episodes, maybe even the first one, featured that pronunciation also.