How the word “robot” was reprogrammed to mean machine : NPR

Clanker, rust bucket, tinskin — slang words used to put down robots are on the rise.

As AI and robots threaten to replace human work and maybe even humans, the recent popularity of anti-robot lingo seems to reflect growing dissent to our changing relationship to robots.

But you might not know that the word itself — robot — first appeared in our lexicon with a cultural critique already built in.

In this edition of Word of the Week , we look at how "robot" went from referring to machine-like humans to human-like machines in the span of about 100 years.

Robot's 'slave' complex

Like clanker, robot came from sci-fi, too.

Czech writer Karel Čapek first imagined the robot in his 1920 play R.U.R. ( Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti , which was translated in English versions as Rossum