I'd assumed until recently that early robots and other forms of artificial being were friendly and regarded as a good thing in early science fiction. Now it seems they were symbols of arrogance and guilt right from the start!
The cancelled Catholic intellectual E Michael Jones points out that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley may have been afflicted by guilt over the suicide of Harriet, Percy Shelley's estranged wife. Frankenstein's monster became an object that guilt. Similarly, in Aliens, the monsters represent guilt over growing sexual licence and abortion, he suggests.
If true this sort of thing may explain why the monsters are typically extremely powerful, can break through steel doors, etc. One cannot escape from them just as one cannot escape from a guilty conscience.
So our ideas about robots may say more about us than about robots. It would be a shame if psychological baggage were to hamper the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). It would mean that science fiction has primed us to reject the sub-creation of life merely because we project easily onto anything that resembles ourselves: even before it has come into existence.
There is an old story of a Prague rabbi named Loew, who made a golem of clay; an artifical servant of sorts. Needless to say, the golem, through an error of the rabbi, escaped his control and started behaving violently. Fortunately the rabbi was able to incapacitate him (it?).
This story is, I think, 400 years old?
It seems that humans have been distrustful about artificial beings since a long time, before they actually could have met them.
> I'd assumed until recently that early robots and other forms of artificial being were friendly and regarded as a good thing in early science fiction. Now it seems they were symbols of arrogance and guilt right from the start!
I believe Asimov has written that when he started writing his robot tales, one of his goals was to have robot stories that were not just Frankenstein stories, which he said were prevalent at the time.
Another favourite is of course Lieutenant Commander Data. His goal, rather than to destroy humanity, was to become more human himself. This is finally realised when he is presented with an 'emotion chip'.
Yet if neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms is correct it turns out that emotions are the foundation of all minds, i.e. Data could not have been emotionless to begin with.
> I'd assumed until recently that early robots and other forms of artificial being were friendly and regarded as a good thing
See also Metropolis and many other works of art and fiction.
But I don't see one speculative theory about one author of one story (from centuries ago) as significant to a serious contemporary issue. It provides no evidence of the risks and the level of risk, nor an argument about them. Dismissing Mary Shelley, even if accepted, tells us nothing about whether AI can safely drive a car, make judicial decisions, decide whether you get a loan, or drop bombs.
The risk is perceived far beyond that story or older sci-fi, but widely anticipated by leading scientists and technologists of our day. What about their evidence and arguments? Nor is it hard to imagine risks with little thought.
> cancelled
Do we really need to inject reactionary politics into a discussion of AI? Does that further the conversation?
Also “howitzer” is the English pronunciation of a Czech invention, houfnice, from the Hussite wars. They were the first to use firearms on a mass scale, arming peasants with pistols, long guns, and dragging artillery they designed in wagon carts. Was a real shocker to the medieval knights they were fighting.
I actually read the play, it's very good. A "robot" is a simplified human, assembled in a factory, with no reproductive capability. There was an implied aspect of sex slavery, as well. By the end, a pseudo Adam and Eve have emerged.
In Czech, 'robota' is an archaic word for 'work'. I remember my great-grandaunt use it when I was a kid. I think Karel Capek credited his brother Josef, poet/painter, for coining the term 'robot'.
To me it has negative connotations. I'd be way more likely to use the word "robota" (as opposed to just "praca") when I'm not too happy about what is involved.
Yes and no. Ostrava, as a huge industrial center, had an unique mix of ethnicities (Czech, German, Jewish, Slovak, Galician, Silesian, Polish etc.) that interacted and created a mixed language. As a result, the dialect is different from the one used in the Silesian countryside. There is a lot of very specific words that probably weren't used in the original agricultural setting of Silesia (such as "papaláš", meaning a high-ranking official).
And reading collections of old Silesian folklore from the villages, I noticed the rustic language having some extra features no longer present in Ostrava as well.
But the staccato accent is pretty much the same, yes. As is the preserved pronunciation of hard "y" which died out in standard Czech some 600 years ago.
I’m familiar with the staccato accent (first time I heard was an angry train station janitor in Bohumín :D) but what’s the hard “y” sound? I’d known of tvrdé y/ý and měkké i/í depending on some consonant but I think you’re talking about something different (and interesting!)
Tvrdé y/ý and měkké i/í exist in written form in standard Czech, but they have been pronounced in the same way, softly, across most of the country since the late Middle Ages or so. That is why many pupils struggle with "where to write y and where to write i", because it does not correspond to their daily experience with spoken Czech.
An interesting exception is the region around Ostrava, where "y" remained a clearly different vowel in pronunciation until today.
I was just curious what the difference is, but that might be hard to convey over text :-D I have a friend from Frydek-Mistek, I’ll ask her for a demonstration :)
I have fond memories of his short stories and wonderful kind fairy tales. I used to read them as a child, some I remember almost word for word being 50 now.
The excellent book Ariel Like A Harpy, an analysis of the Shelleys' Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound, includes a chapter on R.U.R., and draws explicit lines of influence linking them.
Believe it or not I was briefly a Czech major in college. Fantastic literature. I never quite understood why the whole connection with the word robot was always so strongly emphasized though, even then.
I think for small nations, external validation is important, and robot took off. So Czechs themselves will be quick to point that out among listing their achievements. There is much better Czech literature out there.
Apparently Gene Roddenberry was inspired to create Star Trek by the Czech sci-fi film Ikarie X-B1. The resemblance is there. Also there is a Czech sci-Fi film with the first known selfie stick.
R.U.R is a fantastic work that unfortunately has been perpetually shrouded in obscurity, despite its outsized popular influence. I highly recommend reading it.
Yes, Slavic languages have similarities. The same could be said for Germanic languages like English and German or Latin languages like Spanish and Portuguese.
That doesn't change the fact that the word "robot" in the meaning of artificial human was first used in R.U.R.
The word 'robota' is also related to the German word 'arbeiter'; both suggesting 'laborer' at the most basic level, and sometimes used as a euphemism for outright slave.
Thus the ironic power of the word's use in the play, the same irony that powers the motto 'Arbeit Macht Frei'.
"Robotnik" is still used in Polish to mean someone who does manual labor and the like. The pejorative "robol" translates as "prole" as in "proletarian".
When Capek created word robot using robotnik as a base, the term was not used for close to 200 years. Czech translation of robotnik in Polish would be delnik.
The cancelled Catholic intellectual E Michael Jones points out that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley may have been afflicted by guilt over the suicide of Harriet, Percy Shelley's estranged wife. Frankenstein's monster became an object that guilt. Similarly, in Aliens, the monsters represent guilt over growing sexual licence and abortion, he suggests.
If true this sort of thing may explain why the monsters are typically extremely powerful, can break through steel doors, etc. One cannot escape from them just as one cannot escape from a guilty conscience.
So our ideas about robots may say more about us than about robots. It would be a shame if psychological baggage were to hamper the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). It would mean that science fiction has primed us to reject the sub-creation of life merely because we project easily onto anything that resembles ourselves: even before it has come into existence.