Robot history: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. When did automatons first emerge? Which science fiction depiction of robots is the most accurate? And why did so many people fall for a hoax robot called? The mechanical Turk.

Here in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Kerry McInerney answers some of the most intriguing questions on the history of robots. I'd like to start with a question that was submitted by one of our followers on social media called Harry Stone. And that question is, where does the term robot originate from? So the word robot is interestingly quite new given that we have a much longer history of making robotic-like objects, but the term robot itself was coined in 1921 in a play called Rossum's Universal Robots by the Czech playwright Karl Chapek. This play was about a robot uprising of a number of robotic workers.

The term robot is often translated as meaning slave. It's not entirely clear to me if that's an accurate translation. I think maybe a more accurate translation would be something like forced laborer. And certainly my colleague Tom Hollinick here at the Leverhume Center for the Future of Intelligence thinks that maybe translating robot as slave can be a little bit misleading in some ways.

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