Robots, Before They Were Robots

Before Hollywood, before Boston Dynamics, robots were about labor, not lasers.

In 1920, Czech playwright Karel Čapek introduced the world to a new word: robot. His play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) imagined synthetic workers designed to perform every task humans no longer wanted to do. And at first, it was great. The robots toiled without complaint. They freed people from drudgery. They ran the factories, built the cities, e…