Robot

Robot (pronounced roh-bot)

(1) A machine resembling a human, designed to perform certain functions.  Originally, the most popular were the “intelligent” mechanical beings which appeared in science fiction (SF) but of late advances in technology have encouraged manufacturers to build robots in humanoid form, the advantage being they can be applied to replace human labor using without the need to change existing infrastructure.

(2) A person who acts and responds in a mechanical, routine manner, usually subject to another's will; an automaton (often a figurative use).

(3) A device operating automatically, in a pre-programmed fashion.

(4) As a non-physical device (in software), a program which to some extent (including beyond) can duplicate or emulate human actions; now often called “bots”.

(5) As a modifier, a device not (directly) controlled by a human; something automated within certain parameters (such devices sometimes called “robot” in colloquial use).

(6) In surveying, a specialized form of theodolite which follows the movements of a prism and can thus be used by a single operator.

(7) In various forms of modern & modernist dance, a style in which dancers imitate the stiff and jerky movements of a stereotypical fictional robot.

(8) In various on-line communities, a habitual user who posts content of dubious or no value (in this case a human, not a bot in the modern sense)  In the earlier era of the bulletin boards an equivalent term was “slug” (which was probably worse than being labeled a “file pig”).

(9) In internet use (1) a computer-controlled character in a video game, especially a multiplayer one, (2) a dreadfully inempt player of video games and (3) a person thought to have no independent capacity for thought.

(10) Figuratively, a person who seems not to have emotions.

1920: Robot first appears (in the modern sense) in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots (1920)) by Czech writer Karel Čapek (1890–1938), the word suggested by his brother, the artist, writer & poet Josef Čapek (1887–1945).  R.U.R. was Čapek's first international success and was a dystopian vision of an industrial society and while sometimes compared to Charlie Chaplin’s (1889–1977) Modern Times (1936), thematically, they’re quite different.  Typically, the word was brought unchanged into English but such was the simplicity of form that many languages have also retained the spelling, the odd variation including the Japanese robotto (ロボット) and the Swahili roboti.  Surprisingly, despite what must be a temptation, ROBOT is a rare construction as an acronym.  Robot, robotics, robotism, robotry, roboticization & roboticist are nouns, robotic, robotistic, robotical & robotlike (and the non-standard robotesque) are adjectives, robotize (also as roboticise) is a verb and robotically is an adverb; the noun plural is robots.

The Czech-derived robot (mechanical person, also “person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical”) was from robota (drudgery, servitude, compulsory labor) and robotník (the landless peasant so employed (although that was also sometimes applied to “richer peasants” (al la the Russian кула́к (kulák) (wealthy peasant) who employed their own roboniks), from robotiti (to work, drudge), from an Old Czech source akin to the Old Church Slavonic rabota (servitude), from rabu (slave), from the Old Slavic orbu-, from the primitive Indo-European orbh- (pass from one status to another (and related to the later English “orphan”)).  The German noun Robot, was used to refer to a system of serfdom in Central Europe, under which a tenant's rent was paid in forced labor and the Slavic thread is related to the German Arbeit (work), from the Old High German arabeit. 

Several derived forms entered the language after appearing in Liar! (1941, a short story by Russian-born US SF author Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) including the adjective robotic (of or characteristic of robots) and the nouns robopsychologist (one who studies or practices the discipline of robopsychology) & robotics (the science of robots, their construction and use) and earlier, in Robbie (1940 and first published as Strange Playfellow), he’d introduced roboticist (one who conceptualizes, designs, builds, programs, and experiments with robots).  Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics (1968) is often quoted as the basic framework of protocols which should be adopted as a regulatory environment for the industry.

Daleks: The original BBC series was broadcast in black & white which made life easier for the props department but the cyborg Daleks later came in designer colors.

“Bot” has become familiar in the internet era to describe software implementations which appear (sometimes deliberately) to be actual humans but it has a long history.  According to the authoritative Online Etymology Dictionary, “bot” as a head-clipping of “robot” was unknown until around the turn of the twenty-first century and remarkably: “The method of minting new slang by clipping the heads off words does not seem to be old or widespread in English.  The examples (za from pizza, zels from pretzels, rents from parents, burbs from suburbs) are American English student or teen slang and seem to date back no further than the late 1960s.”  Bot has flourished as have (cy)borg & (an)droid and there is sometimes genuine linguistic innovation in the field:  The name of the cyborg (a combination of robotics and a biological intelligence) Daleks in the BBC Dr Who television series was an invention with no etymological basis.

Long before computers and robots, “bot” had a history.  In the early sixteenth century, in what was thought an alteration of the Scottish Gaelic boiteag (maggot), in both England a Scotland, bot (and bott) meant “the larva of a botfly, which infests the skin of various mammals, producing warbles, or the nasal passage of sheep, or the stomach of horses”.  Unrelated to that (hopefully), was the eighteenth century English slang (often as the verbs botting & botted) meaning “to buggar” (ie the old criminal offence of “the abominable crime of buggery”).  Presumably an independent evolution was the now obsolete Australian slang meaning “to ask for and be given something with the direct intention of exploiting the thing’s usefulness” and dictionaries of slang suggest it was used almost exclusively of cigarettes (ie “can I bot a smoke?” a alternative form of “can I bum a smoke?”, the latter form now rare but still heard.  The World War I (1914-1918) era slang in Australia & New Zealand indicating a “"worthless, troublesome person” is extinct.  Strangely, given the document fondness for clippings & abbreviations in the camp lexicon, “bot” seems never to have emerged as a form of “bottom” which, in gay (male) slang, is the companion term for “top”.

Lindsay Lohan in the stop motion-animated sketch comedy Robot Chicken (2005-).  The character was voiced by Breckin Meyer (b 1974).

Of late, additions to the language have included robothood (the state or condition of being a robot; an environment largely or exclusively inhabited by robots), robotless (a place, institution or device in which robots are not used) and fembot (a female version of a robot).  Note that fembot is used in different ways.  In SF, fembots could genuinely be “female robots” for in the genre not only could there be actual genders (as opposed to the mere representation of characteristics) but there was not of necessity any need for the number of different sexes to be restricted to two.  In real-world use, voice fembots were among the earliest widely to be deployed and that was because the research made clear the female voice tended to be preferred (by men and women), thus the “talking clocks”, automated switchboard attendants etc usually being feminine.  In (derogatory) figurative use, fembot was used also to suggest a docile, unthinking and conformist woman (something like a mature version of the “basic bitch”), the idea explored in Ira Levin’s (1929—2007) The Stepford Wives (1972); the “feminist horror” genre remains still sadly neglected.  Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and sensors have in recent years made fembots notably more “realistic” and fembots have already been deployed in two of the oldest of the “feminized” professions: sex work & health care.

In medicine, the possibilities had been discussed for decades but the first products emerged in the 1980s as technology caught up with the most simple of the ambitions, robotic arms for use in simple procedures the first commercially available.  Progress was incremental until the last ten years although robotics did make a significant contribution to research, not only taking the place of human labor but making possible projects which would never otherwise have been possible because some of the big data analysis would have required so much labor that funding would never have been available.  The evolutionary pattern in the industry will likely follow the same path as in the legal professional in that the first human jobs to go are those in back-office and other administrative functions before ancillary roles are also absorbed by machines.  The clinicians will be last to be thinned from the hollowed-out middle while at the upper end, executive roles will continue and perhaps even expand while at the lowest level, cleaners, porters, security guards and such may endure, not because machines can’t be built to do the jobs but the nature of the duties is such the attrition rate will for the foreseeable future make human labor cheaper.

Grace the bot, coming to a hospital near you.

The use of fembots as ancillaries in clinical health care will of course be the thin end of the wedge because a fembot can instantly recall the complete medical history of all patients in a hospital while simultaneously possessing an unparalleled degree of medical knowledge, dynamically updated minute by minute.  Already, machines are proving better than humans in fields such as the analysis of diagnostic imagery and in the near to mid-term, the only obvious disciplines in the field where they’re likely to remain at a disadvantage is in certain surgeries and other activities where physical dexterity or the ability to execute intricate movements is at a premium.  Years from now (and there’s genuine debate about how many), those wishing to pursue a career in medicine might find psychiatry remains the last human preserve, at least for those tending to the rich; the poor will be relegated to pacifying drugs and bots. 

A Harmony 2.0 in completed form.

As sex dolls, progress has been followed with great interest and the most interesting aspect has been the extent of the focus on communication, the manufacturers clearly responding to demand from men for a “relationship” and not merely a more elaborate and life-like sex toy.  The phenomenon of “lonely Japanese Men” has for some time been well-documented and it’s unlikely the problem is culturally specific so such demand is likely to exist also in other markets.  Manufacturers in the Far East have been active but so are players in Europe and the US and with the mechanical challenges “substantially” solved, attention has turned to emotions and their physical manifestations.  In April 2023, US-based Abyss Creations displayed what was described as a “new generation sexbot”, “Harmony 2.0” said to have the ability to learn from “her human companion” a greater range of emotions which subsequently can be generated, including tears.  Technology site CNET reported Harmony can be customized and is interactive, conversations able to be conducted, the quality of which will improve over time because the sexbot will learn from the experience; thus the emotional range of one Harmony 2.0 will differ from another which has been interacting with a different companion.  Memory is persistent and Abyss have indicated that at some time in the future, a greater range of “pre-loaded personalities” will be available, users able to choose “their type”, some presumably preferring a quiet and deferential sexbot, others something more highly strung.  Like anything, it’s all a question of what one wants from life (a male version is said to be “in development”) and being a software download, the implication is that if the personality of one’s Harmony 2.0 proves unsatisfactory, the memory can be over-written with something which hopefully proves better.  By default, Harmony has 18 distinct personality traits such as such as “shyness” or “strong sexual desire”; there seems no proneness to headaches although, at the software level, there’s no reason why one couldn’t be trained to display anything from aversion to sex to actual frigidity.  Again, it’s all a matter of what one wants from life and one can map one’s kinks onto one’s Harmony 2.0.

Mix & match: Being modular, there is a Harmony app (a subscription service) with which users can “build their bot”, customizing it according to one’s preferences (appearance and personality).

A Harmony 2.0 requires some 80 hours of labor to complete and every detail is said to be “perfect” (ie conforming to the desired specification) and the devices are modular.  This is familiar from the model used to build industrial robots where the one core design could be adapted to welding, component placing, painting or a range of other activities, simply by swapping attachments like arms and changing software instruction sets.  With sexbots, the modularity focuses more on aesthetic elements such as hair, eyes, mouths, breasts and such.  At the time of release, Abyss listed Harmony 2.0 at US$6,500 while the “tearful” version was US$12,000, reflecting both the development costs and the additional hardware (presumably plumbing including a “tear reservoir”) required.  Sexbots may only ever be a market niche but in a sense, it’s the oldest niche in the world.