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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anthropomorphs

From: Ptak Science Books

“The concept of high-tech machines shaped like humans has been with us for the better part of a century. The word ‘robot’ itself, derived from the old Slavonic word rabota, meaning ‘servitude’, dates back to 1921, when it appeared in the Czech play R U R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. Then, the robots in the play were, of course, played by human actors, and thus humanoid in appearance. Yet this early work set the stage for what form robots should take in our imagination; from the novels and short stories of Isaac Asimov to the androids of the movies, they have, for the most part, looked, acted, and even experienced the world like us. [...]"

— Michael Belfiore, aeon
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“I’ve addressed the ideas of early mechanical men elsewhere in this blog (just enter 'robot' in the site search box at left and you'll find two or three dozen related posts on the subject), but failed to include this very fine and early example by William Heath in his March of Intellect series (printed from 1825-1829). He was particularly bitter about what he saw as an aristocracy of official ruination, and created an unusual steam-driven mechanical man with a book-driven intellect that swept up the great ‘rubbish’ and ‘dust’ of society. At the top of this early robot (preceding the invention of the term by about 100 years) was a pile of books with a ‘crown of many towers,’ which was London University, beneath which was a set of gas-light eyes, iron arms, and legs made of printer's tools, sweeping away useless and insulting lawyers and jurists and their legal wigs and obsolete and repetitive rules, medical quacks, and the dust of other official abuses, ‘sweeping rubbish from the land.’”
— Ptak Science Books
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