robot：诞生于一部戏剧
Today we talk about robots that vacuum our floors, build our cars and even perform surgery. But the word "robot" is only about a hundred years old, and it wasn't invented by a scientist or an engineer. It came from a play.
In 1920, the Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote a science fiction play called R.U.R., which stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots". In the play, a factory produces artificial people to do work that humans don't want to do. At first, everything goes well. But in the end, the robots rebel and turn against their human masters.
Čapek needed a name for his artificial workers. His first idea was labori, from the Latin word for work, but he wasn't happy with it. So he asked his brother Josef, a painter, for advice. Josef suggested "roboti", from the Czech word robota, which means forced labour – the hard, unpaid work that poor farmers once had to do for their lords.
The play was a huge success. It was performed in New York and London, translated into dozens of languages, and the word "robot" quickly spread around the world.
Interestingly, Čapek's robots weren't made of metal. They were more like human beings grown from chemicals. The idea of robots as machines with wires and gears came later.
The play also introduced an idea that still worries many people today: what happens if the machines we create become smarter than we are? A hundred years later, we're still asking the same question.
今天我们谈论的机器人，能扫地、造汽车，甚至做手术。可是“robot”这个词才诞生了一百年左右，而且它不是科学家或工程师发明的，而是来自一部戏剧。
1920 年，捷克作家卡雷尔·恰佩克写了一部科幻剧，名叫《R.U.R.》，意思是“罗素姆万能机器人”。剧中，一家工厂生产人造人，替人类去做人类不想做的工作。一开始，一切都很顺利。可是到了最后，机器人起来造反，反抗它们的人类主人。
恰佩克需要给这些人造工人起个名字。他最先想到的是 labori，来自拉丁语的“工作”，可他不太满意。于是他向当画家的哥哥约瑟夫请教。约瑟夫建议用“roboti”，来自捷克语单词 robota，意思是“强迫劳动”——也就是过去贫苦农民必须为领主做的、没有报酬的苦工。
这部戏大获成功。它在纽约和伦敦上演，被翻译成几十种语言，“robot”这个词也迅速传遍了世界。
有意思的是，恰佩克笔下的机器人并不是用金属做的，它们更像是用化学物质培育出来的人。把机器人想象成由电线和齿轮组成的机器，是后来才有的事。
这部戏还提出了一个至今仍让许多人担忧的问题：如果我们创造出来的机器变得比我们还聪明，会发生什么？一百年过去了，我们还在问同样的问题。