On Sun, Sep 16, 2018, 4:34 AM Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen...@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
> I would also disagree with Greg Ewing's take on "robot". It may have > meant "slave" in the original Czech, but in English it has strong > connotations of "automaton" and an inherent lack of autonomy, quite > different from a human slave's flexibility to perform any command, Robot doesn't mean "slave" in Czech, but rather "serf." Serfdom was/is a terrible institution, but nothing best so terrible as the Atlantic slave trade of the 15th-19th C which is what modern usage tends to indicates. Moreover, the morpheme "rōb" is commonplace in Slavic languages to mean "work" in a more general sense. Wikipedia: Karl Čapek's fictional story postulated the technological creation of artificial human bodies without souls, and the old theme of the feudal robota class eloquently fit the imagination of a new class of manufactured, artificial workers.
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