From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

Bob Garfield is away this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And this week we ponder the current state of artificial intelligence and its potential to, you know,

elevate or annihilate humanity.

Why has Google gobbled up the greatest minds in the field of robotics?

Why does the army use smartbot recruiters? Why are we leery of thinking machines but leap at

the chance to snooze in the back seat while our cars drive themselves? It's a surprisingly old

question, though the ancients seemed less conflicted.

Take 11th century China, where mechanical humanoids chime the hours on an astronomical clock.

Ever after and across the world, we craft automata to play music, write letters, and lately even plumb our souls.

The first use of the word robot, derived from the Slavic word for work, dates from 1920,

a play by the Czech writer Karel Chappek. It's called Rossum's Universal Robots, or R-U-R-R.

And it doesn't end well, for us. Here's a scene from

Yuri Rizovsky's radio play. It was a crime to make robots. No, Alquist, I don't regret that

even today. Not even today? Not even today, the last day of civilization. Was it a crime to shatter the servitude of labor, the dreadful and humiliating labor that man had to undergo?

Work was too hard.

Life was too hard. And to overcome that...

Was not what the two rossums had in mind.

It's what I had in mind.

How well you succeeded! How well we all succeeded. For

profit. For progress. We have destroyed mankind. That mortal conflict has since played out countless

times in novels and on screens large and small. I mean, it's not always a conflict, but usually,

...