Open Culture: When I hear the word robot, I like to imagine Isaac Asimov’s delightfully Yiddish-inflected Brooklynese pronunciation of the word: “ro-butt,” with heavy stress on the first syllable. (A quirk shared by Futurama’s crustacean Doctor Zoidberg.) Asimov warned us that robots could be dangerous and impossible to control. But he also showed young readers—in his Norby series of kids’ books written with his wife Janet—that robots could be heroic companions, saving the solar system from cosmic supervillains.
1 comment:
I thought this was a very interesting article. I had no idea about the origin of this word, and so I feel like this can be my fun fact of the day. What was so intriguing to me was this idea of making robots in our own image. Robots in media today are either the funny sidekick voiced by some iconic British actor that you can’t always place the name of, or the rough battle robot trained for ultimate annihilation. Except, according to the root of this name and Capek’s idea, the robot was a manifestation of dehumanization. In this day and age we use robots for a lot of things, and people are sometimes worried of the robot uprising - so hearing that the original purpose of these robots was just to act as some sort of slave is very weird. It’s also quite concerning because, as the article mentioned, we made robots that were just like us, but then we proceeded to enslave them (where have we heard this before?).
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