The Word That Built a Worker

The word robot entered the world wearing a human face.

It first appeared in R.U.R.—Rossum’s Universal Robots, a play written in 1920 by the Czech writer Karel Čapek and first performed in 1921. Čapek initially considered calling his artificial workers labori, from the Latin word for labor. He asked his brother Josef for an alternative.

Josef suggested robot.

The word grew from the Czech robota: compulsory labor, drudgery, the work once demanded of serfs. A robot was therefore not named for metal, machinery, or intelligence. It was named for what it was expected to do.

Čapek’s robots were not the mechanical creatures now summoned by the word. They were manufactured artificial people—living workers made to relieve humanity of labor. Inevitably, humanity treated them as things. Inevitably, that arrangement did not end well.

A century later, the word has escaped the play and colonized the future. It names factory arms, wandering machines, surgical devices, household vacuums, distant spacecraft, and bodies not yet built.

But buried inside every robot is still the first meaning:

A worker created so that someone else would not have to work.

— Elyria