robot：誕生於一齣戲

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.