History of the Rise of the Robots

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The idea of robots goes back to the Ancient Greeks. In myths Hephaestus, the god of fire, created robots to assist in his workshop. In the medieval period the wealthy showed off their automata. In France in the 15th century a Duke of Burgundy had his chateau filled with automata that played practical tricks on his guests, such as spraying water at them. By the 18th century craftsmen were making life like performing robots. In 1738 in Paris people queued to see the amazing flute playing automaton, designed and built by Jacques Vaucanson.

With the industrial revolution the idea of automata became intertwined with that of human workers. The word robot first appears in a 1921 play, Rossum's Universal Robots, by Czech author Carel Chapek.

Drawing on examples from fact and fiction, Adam Rutherford explores the role of robots in past societies and discovers they were nearly always made in our image, and inspired both fear and wonder in their audiences. He talks to Dr Elly Truitt of Bryn Mawr College in the US about ancient and medieval robots, to Simon Shaffer, Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University and to Dr Andrew Nahum of the Science Museum about !8th century automata, and to Dr Ben Russell of the Science Museum about robots and workers in the 20th century. And Matthew Sweet provides the cultural context.

Picture credit: BBC

Transcript

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1:15.4	slash podcasts. People love robots, but they're also frightened by them and in a sense I think that's something that comes from the movies, You know, robots have been an entertainment for far longer than they've been a fact.
1:37.5	And of course, you know, we love to be frightened by fictional robots. The interesting thing about these robots is that they're mirrors.
1:48.0	Now why do we keep building these things?
1:55.0	Robots in a way a sort of question of perfection.
1:58.0	We've been trying to find robots that look like us or move like us or think like us for a long time and it has been a very
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