Robot

• 1. Introduction

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  Robot. The word arrived in English in 1923, borrowed from Czech, rooted in a term meaning forced labor or drudgery. A Czech author named Karel Capek needed a word for the manufactured workers in his play R.U.R., and he almost called them laboři, from the Latin for labor. It was his brother Josef, a painter and writer, who suggested roboti instead. In doing so, Josef Capek gave the world one of its most consequential coinages.

  What is a robot, exactly? There is no agreed definition. Experts broadly agree that robots accept electronic programming, process data, operate with some degree of autonomy, move or manipulate their environment, and exhibit behavior that mimics living creatures. A robot can be a humanoid like Honda's ASIMO, a microscopic nanobot, a drone like the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, or a machine arm welding car frames in a factory in New Jersey.

  The questions this documentary will answer are older and stranger than the word itself. Humans have dreamed of artificial beings since antiquity. They have worried about what those beings might do. And they have built them anyway. What does the history of that impulse reveal? And what happens when the machines become capable enough to act on their own?

• 2. Ancient Dreams of Artificial Life

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  Galatea, the mythical statue carved by Pygmalion that came to life, appears in Greek mythology alongside Talos, a man of bronze who guarded Crete from pirates, and the mechanical servants built by the god Hephaestus. These stories were not idle fantasy. They reflected a persistent human desire to create beings that could labor, protect, and serve.

  Greek engineers translated that desire into hardware. In the 4th century BCE, Archytas of Tarentum described a steam-operated mechanical bird he called "The Pigeon." Hero of Alexandria, who lived between roughly 10 and 70 CE, went further, creating automated devices powered by pneumatics, hydraulics, and steam, including one described as "speaking."

  Chinese texts recorded their own tradition. The Han Feizi reports that the 5th century BCE philosopher Mozi and his contemporary Lu Ban built artificial wooden birds capable of flight. In 1066, the inventor Su Song built a water clock in tower form with mechanical figurines that chimed the hours. Its mechanism included a programmable drum machine, where moving pegs to different positions caused the drummer to play different patterns.

  In Mesopotamia, the 13th-century polymath Ismail al-Jazari built automated devices driven by hydropower: peacocks, automatic gates, water clocks, and a humanoid waitress that could serve drinks from a reservoir system. He also invented a hand-washing automaton with a flush mechanism similar to those in modern toilets. Leonardo da Vinci, who may have been influenced by al-Jazari's work, sketched plans around 1495 for a mechanical humanoid that could sit up, wave its arms, and move its head and jaw.

• 3. The Word Takes Shape

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  Karel Capek published R.U.R. in 1920, and the play introduced the word robot to a mass audience. The factory in the play used a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people. These workers were efficient, emotionless, incapable of original thought, and indifferent to self-preservation. At issue in the play was whether they were being exploited, and what would follow from a civilization's dependence on commodified labor.

  Capek's robots prefigured what we now call androids: beings that can be mistaken for humans. The drama climaxes when specially-formulated robots achieve self-awareness and lead a global uprising. Capek himself credited his brother Josef with the actual word. In a letter responding to an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, Karel explained that he had consulted Josef, who suggested roboti. The word robota in Czech, and across many Slavic languages, means the compulsory labor a serf owed to his lord, typically six months of the year.

  The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov added the next major layer. He coined the word robotics, which he later admitted he assumed already existed, by analogy with mechanics and hydraulics. Asimov also formulated his Three Laws of Robotics, introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround." A robot may not injure a human being; a robot must obey human orders unless they conflict with the First Law; a robot must protect its own existence unless that conflicts with the first two laws. He later added a Zeroth Law superseding all of them: a robot may not harm humanity. Dr. Joanna Bryson of the University of Bath observed that the laws were designed to expose how a simple ethical system fails. Every story in Asimov's robot series, she noted, turns on a failure of those laws.

• 4. The First Real Machines

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  William Grey Walter of the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, England built the first electronic autonomous robots with complex behavior in 1948 and 1949. He wanted to demonstrate that a small number of brain cells, richly connected, could produce very complex behaviors. His machines, named Elmer and Elsie, were three-wheeled and moved slowly enough that observers described them as tortoises. They were capable of phototaxis: when their batteries ran low, they could find their way to a recharging station by following light.

  Walter insisted on using purely analogue electronics to simulate brain processes, at a moment when Alan Turing and John von Neumann were arguing for digital computation as the model of mind. His approach influenced later generations of researchers including Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, and Mark Tilden.

  The first commercial, digital, and programmable robot was built by George Devol in 1954. He called it the Unimate. Devol sold the first unit to General Motors, and it was installed in 1961 at a plant in Trenton, New Jersey, where it lifted hot pieces of metal from die casting machines and stacked them. The first palletizing robot appeared in 1963, introduced by the Fuji Yusoki Kogyo Company. In 1973, KUKA robotics in Germany patented a robot with six electromechanically driven axes. Three years later, Victor Scheinman invented the programmable universal manipulation arm and sold the design to Unimation.

  Remote control had its own lineage. In 1877, Louis Brennan invented the Brennan torpedo, powered by contra-rotating propellers spun by pulling wires from drums inside the body. It was described at the time as the world's first practical guided missile. In 1903, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo demonstrated a radio control system called Telekino at the Paris Academy of Sciences. The Telekino remotely controlled a tricycle in 1904, considered the first unmanned ground vehicle, and an electric boat in 1906, controlled from more than two kilometers away.

• 5. The Factory Floor and Beyond

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  Over the last three decades, automobile factories have become dominated by robots. A typical factory now contains hundreds of industrial robots on fully automated production lines, with roughly one robot for every ten human workers. A vehicle chassis moves along a conveyor and is welded, glued, painted, and assembled at a sequence of robot stations.

  Printed circuit boards are almost exclusively manufactured by pick-and-place robots using SCARA manipulators, which remove tiny electronic components from strips or trays and place them onto boards with high accuracy. Such robots can place hundreds of thousands of components per hour, far exceeding human speed and reliability.

  In mining, Rio Tinto operates a fleet of 150 autonomous Komatsu trucks in Western Australia, the largest such fleet in the world. BHP has announced the world's largest autonomous drill fleet: 21 autonomous Atlas Copco drills. The Atlas Copco Rig Control System can autonomously execute a drilling plan, moving a rig into position using GPS and drilling to specified depths without human intervention.

  In 2008, Caterpillar developed a self-driving dump truck. By 2015, these machines were actively used in mining operations in Australia by Rio Tinto Coal Australia. In July 2020, scientists reported a mobile robot chemist capable of working nearly around the clock and making autonomous decisions about its next actions. In searches for photocatalyst mixtures, the robot identified combinations that were six times more active than initial formulations.

  Roughly half of all robots in the world are in Asia, with 40% in Japan alone. Europe accounts for 32%, and North America for 16%.

• 6. Ethics, Autonomy, and Fear

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  In 2009, experts at a conference hosted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence discussed whether robots and computers might acquire genuine autonomy and what hazards that might pose. They noted that some robots had already achieved semi-autonomy: finding their own power sources, and independently selecting targets to attack with weapons.

  The military context sharpens these concerns. The US Navy funded a report concluding that as military robots grow more complex, their capacity to make autonomous decisions deserves greater attention. The robot known as EATR generated particular concern because it can refuel itself using organic matter, including biomass found on battlefields. The BAE Systems Mantis and the BAE Taranis, a combat aircraft built for Great Britain, are designed to select their own courses, make most decisions independently, and in the Taranis case, fly across continents without a pilot.

  Manuel De Landa has argued that smart missiles and autonomous bombs already qualify as robots, and that the trend represents a dangerous transfer of important decisions from humans to machines.

  On the economic side, Foxconn announced in July 2011 a three-year plan to replace workers with robots, aiming to expand from ten thousand to one million robots. Kevin J. Delaney reported that Bill Gates proposed taxing companies' use of robots as a way to slow the spread of automation and fund alternative employment. The World Bank's World Development Report 2019 argued that while automation displaces workers, technological innovation creates more new industries and jobs on balance.

  Vernor Vinge has named the hypothetical moment when computers and robots surpass human intelligence the Singularity, and described it as potentially very dangerous for humans. Japan and South Korea have already begun passing regulations requiring robots to be equipped with safety systems, and possibly with rule sets modeled on Asimov's Three Laws.

• 7. What Comes Next

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  Japan has set a target of full-scale commercialization of service robots by 2025, with much of the research direction steered by the country's Trade Ministry. The Robot Operating System, an open-source software framework developed at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Technical University of Munich among others, provides a way to program robot navigation and limbs regardless of the specific hardware involved. It can handle image recognition and tasks like opening doors.

  Baxter, introduced in September 2012 by Rethink Robotics, a company founded by Rodney Brooks, demonstrated a new model of industrial robot: one that a regular worker could teach in minutes by moving its arms through the desired motion. No software engineers required. A smaller companion robot, Sawyer, was added in 2015 for more precise tasks. Within a few years, 190 companies in the United States had purchased Baxter units, and they were in commercial use in the United Kingdom as well.

  As early as 1982, observers were confident that robots would eventually cook fast food, shear sheep, pack candy boxes, and serve as prosthetics. The prediction was accurate in direction but consistently optimistic about timing. Evolutionary robotics submits multiple robot designs to tests and uses the best performers as the basis for a next generation. Developmental robotics tracks growth in a single robot's problem-solving over time. The field of soft robotics designs machines with silicone bodies and flexible actuators, mimicking animal biomechanics in ways that open applications in medicine, caregiving, and search and rescue.

  The nanorobotics field is working toward machines whose components approach the scale of a nanometer, potentially small enough to perform surgery at the level of individual cells. Researchers have already produced bearings, sensors, and synthetic molecular motors at that scale. The largest swarm robot systems yet created, including the SRI/MobileRobots CentiBots project, point toward collective machines that can continue operating even when individual units fail, which makes them attractive candidates for space exploration, where a single point of failure can end a mission entirely.