5 ROBOTS, AI, AND TRANSHUMANISM

The robot is among the most familiar icons of science fiction, once instantly marking a work as belonging to the genre. Indeed, the very word comes from a science fiction play, R.U.R., or, Rossum's Universal Robots, by Karel Capek. First performed in 1921, it was translated into multiple languages and performed in several European cities within two years. The Czech word robota, used to describe someone forced to labor, became "robot" in the English translation in 1923, used to describe artificial beings within and beyond sf shortly thereafter. Capek's robots were manufactured out of biological materials, but the term soon fused in the popular imagination with the older image of mechanical automata. With the release of Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927) and its spectacular images of the beautiful mechanical Maria, the public imaginary understood the robot to be a metallic creature, reinforced by Elektro, Westinghouse's mechanical man, who performed at the 1939 World's Fair. By the time Isaac Asimov began to publish his robot stories in the 1940s, the robot was a thoroughly sf creature, a marvel of technology whose roots in dehumanized and exploited labor were muted.