Robot: Making A Mechanical Mind

Science Diction

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Friday, Society & Culture, Science, Origin, Culture, Words, History, Word, Language

4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2021

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

In 1920, a Czech writer was stumped. He’d written a play about a future where machines that looked like people do our bidding. They were the perfect workers: obedient, hard working, and never demanded a pay raise. But what was the writer to call these marvelous machines? There wasn’t yet a word for this type of creation. He had initially chosen labori, from the Latin for labor, but something about the word wasn’t quite right. It seemed...stiff, bookish. This play wasn’t just about machines who labored. It was about machines we exploited, relentlessly. And eventually, the writer landed on a word that fit better: Robot. Robot comes from an old Czech word for drudgery and servitude. Though in his play - like so very many robo-dystopias to come - the writer showed that a mind we create to serve us, isn’t necessarily a mind we can control. Footnotes & Further Reading: See more drawings and diagrams in The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by Ismail al-Jazari. Check out some old footage of Unimate, the first worker robot. Credits: This episode was produced by Johanna Mayer, Julia Pistell, and Elah Feder. Elah is our editor and senior producer. We had sound design and mastering from Chris Wood. Our music was composed by Daniel Peterschmidt. Thank you to Craig Cravens, senior lecturer at Indiana University, for helping us with research about Karel Capek. We had fact checking help from Danya AbdelHameid. Nadja Oertelt is our chief content officer. This season of Science Diction is supported by Audible.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 1936, the Nobel Prize Committee was considering a Czech writer for the prize in literature.
0:08.6	He'd been nominated every year for the past four years.
0:12.7	Problem was, he was just so controversial.
0:16.1	Julia Pistell is a writer from Hartford, Connecticut, and the host of the podcast, Literary Disco.
0:21.6	Carl Chappick's latest novel was about oily, smelly amphibians that take over the world.
0:27.2	He called it War with the Nutes.
0:29.9	The novel describes these giant creatures and their lawyers as they expand their wet and watery territory around the world.
0:37.9	And the Nobel Prize Committee was nervous.
0:41.1	Yes, a lot of people thought Carl was brilliant and wanted him to win,
0:45.2	but this was way too political for the committee to endorse.
0:49.2	Carl was a known anti-fascist, and the Knutes kind of sounded like Nazis.
0:56.1	And the committee was afraid of enraging Adolf Hitler. So they suggested he writes something different. Did he have anything
1:02.2	that would offend nobody? But the playwright refused to offer up something gentler. He
1:08.0	replied, I have already written my doctoral dissertation. He never did win that
1:13.1	Nobel. His body of strange prophetic science fiction was banned by the Germans, and he died in 1938,
1:20.3	trying to warn us about what was coming. And it wasn't just nudes, Carl Chopich was concerned about.
1:27.0	In what would become his most famous
1:28.8	work, he envisioned an even more frightening prospect, and a more likely one. A thing we would
1:35.4	enthusiastically usher into existence, knowing all the while it would spell our demise.
1:41.7	The robot.
1:46.7	From Science Friday, this is science diction.
1:47.8	I'm Johanna Mayer.
	...

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