When I was a lad, the magazine I loved best was Popular Mechanics. Of its articles I’d always jump first to those about robots. I don’t know why robots fascinated me. But fascinated I was. And still am. Maybe because robotics, uniquely, is at the interface of applied science and science fiction. The word robot was coined in the 1921 science fiction play R.U.R. [Rossum’s Universal Robots] by the Czech playwright Karel Capek (1890-1938). Robot comes from the Czech word robota meaning forced labour or serf. And the word robotics was first used in a 1942 short story by Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). Merriam-Webster’s definition of robot mentions several traits: looks like a human (i.e. anthropomorphic), performs various complex acts that a human performs, lacks human emotions, and is guided by automatic controls. I doubt all are necessary for a robot to be a robot. In this series of superb robot photographs on the Boston Globe’s ‘The Big Picture’ site, most but not all the robots look like humans. (Indeed some of the robots are better looking than some humans I’ve seen.) It looks to me like the more utilitarian their function (e.g. military robots) the less human they look. I’m no longer a lad, and I haven’t seen – let alone read – a copy of Popular Mechanics for almost 50 years. (I didn’t even know it’s still published. Evidently it is.) But robots still captivate me as much as they ever did.
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