The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion
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Isaac Azimov
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The term Robot
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IIRC, Descartes said 'machines' (possibly 'automatons') meaning that they were soulless, so couldn't feel pain or experience emotions like people who had souls. He was French & I'm sure plenty of people today would translate his original words from machine or automaton to robot. Several others around here are more familiar with the language & can address this with more authority, but it doesn't seem like a stretch to me.Capek did invent the word from all I've read & his 'robots' were biological, not mechanical in nature. We have a topic on robots here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
We have a topic about Asimov here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
We've also discussed several of his books.
Mod
His term was "bête-machines", so "beast-machines" or "animal-machines".
In the July/August 2021 issue of Today's Veterinary Practice there was an article titled Animal Sentience: An Inconvenient Truth?. The article started out with a quote from Rene Descartes who died in 1650.
The quote read "Animals are like robots: they cannot reason or feel pain."
I believe reading some forward material in one of Azimov's books he stated the term came into use sometime in early 1900's.
From Wikipedia
'Robot' was first applied as a term for artificial automata in the 1920 play R.U.R. by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek. However, Josef Čapek was named by his brother Karel as the true inventor of the term robot.[7][8] The word 'robot' itself was not new, having been in the Slavic language as robota (forced labor), a term applied to peasants obligated to compulsory service under the feudal system (see: Robot Patent).[47][48] Čapek's fictional story postulated the technological creation of artificial human bodies without souls, and the old theme of the feudal robota class eloquently fit the imagination of a new class of manufactured, artificial workers.
So is this a translation glitch or did Descartes actually use the term ROBOT?
I am reading Azimov's books now hearing that there is a planned series on the Foundation books and it just struck me as an improbable and probably false statement or translation.
Rod