bot from god

Photo: a scene from Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R.

“The word robot was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920. The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called robots. The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans.”
— Wikipedia
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“The play [R.U.R] begins in a factory that makes artificial people, called roboti (robots), out of synthetic organic matter. They are not exactly robots by the current definition of the term; these creatures are closer to the modern idea of cyborgs, androids or even clones, as they may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. They seem happy to work for humans at first, but that changes, and a hostile robot rebellion leads to the extinction of the human race.
     Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant class in human society. R.U.R is dark but not without hope, and was successful in its day in both Europe and the United States.”
— Wikipedia
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“There's a lot of bots on twitter. Many of them are spambots that we all just try to ignore. Some of them are funny in an unobtrusive way, like @Horse_ebooks which tweets odd, not entirely incoherent blurbs. Some of them are funny in a somewhat more aggressive way, as in the case of @DBZNappa which finds tweets with the phrase “over 9000” and replies “WHAT?! OVER NINE THOUSAND?!” This uninvited interjection is, depending on whether the recipient grew up watching DBZ, either a funny reminder of childhood, or a flustering narrow pop culture reference.
     But some bots are driven by somewhat more trolly motives. A prime example is @StealthMountain, which searches for people using the phrase “sneak peak” and replies with “I think you mean 'sneak peek'". Effectively, a coder somehwere has used twitter to greatly leverage his ability to be a grammar Nazi. But worse, it appears that the bot exists just to rile people. While most people seem to take this correction in stride, @StealthMountain's favorites list (which is linked from his bio line) is populated with some of the recipients' more colorful reactions. You too, dear reader, can laugh at those victims, and their absurd, futile anger towards the machine.”
— import me.tastable._
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