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The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

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Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#51

Post by lolinder »

robertlagrant wrote: post #35

> whose research interests arguably make her one of the most qualified people to write about Čapek’s perspective on robots. “The chemical robots in the form of microparticles that we designed and investigated, and that had properties similar to living cells, were much closer to Čapek’s original ideas than any other robots today,” Čejková explains in the book’s introduction This doesn't sound right at all. The play's…

Keep reading to the extract from Čapek himself. The primary thing that he emphasizes about his robots is that they were biological in nature, and the primary thing he disliked about where they went from there is that robots became a word that referred to mechanical technology. The scale of the robots didn't matter to him as much as the fact that they specifically were not mechanical.

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#52

Post by dumbo-octopus »

arrowsmith wrote: post #13
xnorswap wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite a policy of "use original titles", the HN software automatically mangles titles. This is one of the more bizarre auto-editing of titles it does because of how pointless it feels. "The man who" is established English convention. "A man who" is changing the meaning for the sake of it without producing a clearer title. The person is unambiguously defined, so the definitive article is entirely correct. If the per…

Looks like it doesn't change all titles that start with "the", see e.g. these two from the current front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082552 So it only changes "the man" to "a man"? (And I'm guessing also "the woman" to "a woman"?) I'm struggling to understand the reasoning here. Can someone give me an example of a title starting with "the man" which sound…

https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/up-in-the-air-meet-the-...

> Up in the Air: Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

> Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

> The Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

> A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916974

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#53

Post by romanhn »

thriftwy wrote: post #43

> when he recently read that, in Moscow, they have shot a major film, in which the world is trampled underfoot by mechanical robots, driven by electromagnetic waves I wonder what's the IMDB id of that...

Pretty sure it's this: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0240539/

Has a Wikipedia page with the full movie embedded! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_Sensation

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#54

Post by andrewshadura »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #31
siftrics wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Russian, работа simply means "work" or "job" without any negative connotation.

Same with Polish, but in Czech where the word originates from, there is a difference and normal work is called "práce" not "robota" which is reserved for forced labor or as an in-jest name for work.

In Slovak, robota is apparently more like in Polish, it's commonly used to mean a job, sometimes as manual work, only historically for forced labour.

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#55

Post by AndrewKemendo »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #19

His robot was hijacked to mean a mechanical man with gears and wires inside and he objected to that. I'm thinking of course that the public only had experience with these things — or perhaps this was another fear of the time, the mechanization of jobs, and so the robot became the perfect avatar for this fear and so evolved. But surely the idea of a mechanical man predates the term, robot. Automatons? Or is the distin…

Yeah the idea of a “mechanical man” is as old as written history

Davinci even had a pretty thorough idea

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_robot

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#56

Post by tsunamifury »

Loughla wrote: post #39
bee_rider wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is sort of funny that when shortening it in English, we ended up with “bot,” dropping the “ro,” which looks like the more important part of the word.

I'm betting it's because Rob as a shortened version doesn't work.

I’ve heard this shortening by Russians also American English “robo” was common

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#57

Post by aspenmayer »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #49

It’s interesting that Philip K. Dick’s androids from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Replicants from the Blade Runner are way closer to Čapek’s robots than to mechanical humanlike contraptions. All three raise the same question — what is humanity, when you really get down to it?

Dildog posted a meme on this topic recently on Mastodon:

A group of monks sit around the Buddha.

Monk: Buddha, what makes us human?

Buddha: Selecting all images with traffic lights.

https://hackers.town/@dildog/111644483541067122

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#58

Post by bee_rider »

pauke wrote: post #24
pawelwentpawel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd translate "robotnik" as a "worker". A "person who is doing something" sounds a bit too general. Nevertheless, it's easy to guess that the root of the word is the same verb.

No, in Czech the meaning really is more specific and forced labor is not an overly bad translation, it's work done by serfs in medieval times. It can be used to describe any work as heavy, but that's either in joke, or when used by people geographically close to Poland (typically referring to mining).

Is there some historical reason for this?

I vaguely remember that in English, we have words like “cattle,” French etymology, and “cow” Germanic, and the speculation is that it is because the aristocracy were French for much of England’s history (so, the French word is used to refer to cows as a sort of abstract resource to be considered in bulk).

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#59

Post by rebolek »

petr25102018 wrote: post #26
rebolek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Czech and while those two languages are close, "robota" is really forced work in Czech. What you called "robota" in Polish is called "práce" in Czech. In Czech, "Robota" is forced work and has bad connotations. See https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robota . It's interesting that this page doesn't have Polish translation.

In the region where I was growing up next to Poland, we say "chodit do roboty" when describing normal work.

I don't doubt that, you're probably from somewhere around Ostrava. There are of course regional differences. I'm from Brno and instead of "jít do práce" we usually used "jít do hokny", "jít do háčku", or just "jít makat". Whenever I hear word "robota", I connect it with my grand-grand-...-father who was forced to work ("robota") by "dráb" (overseer) and didn't like it. So he cut overseer's head with his scythe, became a village hero and founded a church there.

So I'm hard-wired to dislike "robota".

Re: The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself

#60

Post by Danieru »

xnorswap wrote: post #10
Almondsetat wrote: post #3

Was the title automatically editorialized? The article clearly says it's "The" man who coined the word "Robot"

Despite a policy of "use original titles", the HN software automatically mangles titles. This is one of the more bizarre auto-editing of titles it does because of how pointless it feels. "The man who" is established English convention. "A man who" is changing the meaning for the sake of it without producing a clearer title. The person is unambiguously defined, so the definitive article is entirely correct. If the per…

IMHO, the "The" and "How" handling were smart decisions back during the digg era.

Over time those features of clickbait have become defocused. Removing The and How handling might make sense now.

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