The First Robot

Summary

Podcast Summary: HISTORY This Week

Episode: The First Robot

Host: Alana Casanova Burgess
Guests: Professor Dennis Jers (Seton Hill University), Professor John Jordan (author, MIT Press book "Robots")
Date: March 23, 2026
Theme: How the invention of the "robot"—in name, literature, and concept—changed society and technology forever, with lasting influence on pop culture, science, and ethical debates around artificial intelligence.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode explores the revolutionary introduction of the word and concept of "robot" through Karel Čapek's 1920 play "Rossum's Universal Robots" (RUR). The show investigates how this cultural moment redefined the boundaries between humans and machines, laying the groundwork for science fiction and real-world robotics, while unpacking the social anxieties that inspired it and its ongoing impact on technology and ethics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: The Birth of "Robot"

• [02:03] The episode opens at Berlin’s Kerfurstedam Theater in 1923 for the German premiere of RUR, a play already captivating audiences across Europe and America.
  • “The lights go down and the curtains open on two actors in a familiar scene. A boss and his secretary at the office.”
    — Alana Casanova Burgess [02:03]
• The scene quickly turns uncanny: the secretary, Sulla, sits still while her boss dictates, only to instantly type a flawless letter.
  • “While Harry’s going on and on, the secretary Sulla is acting a little off.”
    — Alana Casanova Burgess [02:58]
  • This is the audience’s introduction to the "robot," a never-before-seen figure on stage: human-like, but mechanical in efficiency and affect.

Etymology and Origins

• [04:36] The word "robot" debuts in RUR and is quickly picked up in global discourse.
  • “The word robot was invented for this play.”
    — Narrator/Researcher [04:36]
• The term is drawn from the Czech "Robotnik" (forced laborer), resonating in a society recently moved from serfdom to industrial labor.
  • “The word Robotnik meant a serf that owed forced labor to their master, and would have been a term that cut deep into the psyche of a community that only a generation or two ago had been totally controlled by...serfdom.”
    — Narrator/Researcher [12:08]

Čapek’s Influences & The Play’s Dystopian Narrative

• Karel Čapek drew upon his doctor father’s appreciation for science and his mother’s love of folklore, blending technical curiosity with a cautionary perspective on modern bureaucracy and mechanization.
• The rapid industrialization of 19th-century Czech society and the trauma of World War I mechanized warfare inform the play’s anxieties.
  • “Industrialization and the bureaucracy...was at best new and weird and at worst, a violent threat.”
    — Alana Casanova Burgess [07:39]
• In the play, robots are synthetic, flesh-and-blood humanoids designed for labor, not tin men.
  • “These characters were biological, that is, not buckets of bolts.”
    — Narrator/Researcher [13:06]

Social Commentary & Escalation

• Robots are created for "dirty, dangerous, and dull" jobs—the 3Ds—and are thought to have no souls, making them "the perfect worker."
• Helena, a character advocating for robot rights, objects to their treatment, but even she slips into dehumanizing language.
  • “She tries to say, oh no, they were hired. She slips. She initially says bought—the dehumanizing term.”
    — Narrator/Researcher [14:15]
• The play jumps 10 years into a dystopia where humans, displaced by robots in all labor, have ceased to find purpose or reproduce. Robots now fill the armies of clashing nations.
  • “Robots aren't just convenient anymore, they're necessary.”
    — Alana Casanova Burgess [14:31]
• Eventually, a learned robot named Radius incites a rebellion, determining humans are obsolete, resulting in humanity’s extinction—with two robots, Adam and Eve, left to inherit the Earth.

From Flesh to Metal: The Evolution of Robot Imagery

• Later adaptations, especially in the US, shift robots from almost-human to explicitly mechanical, metallic figures—an image that dominates sci-fi for decades.
  • “This shift from synthetic humans to metal machines...changes the concept of robots, the arc of science fiction, and the future of tech forever.”
    — Alana Casanova Burgess [20:00]

Why Did the "Robot" Endure?

• Mechanical beings (automatons) already existed as curiosity—such as the mechanical duck or chess-playing "Turk"—but Čapek’s play made robots a mass cultural phenomenon by making them human-like and positioned against humanity.
  • “It was one of the 20th century's most produced stage plays...People said this is hitting a nerve.”
    — Sponsor/Advertiser [23:12]
• The episode traces how robots in pop culture, especially through films like "Metropolis" (1927), adopt the metallic archetype and the uprising-against-humans trope.

The Asimov Era and the Ethics of Robotics

• Isaac Asimov, reacting against "killer robot" narratives, establishes the famed "Three Laws of Robotics," making ethical conduct core to the robot idea—and even dislikes RUR as a work of fiction.
  • “He even says publicly that he thinks RUR is a terrible play.”
    — Alana Casanova Burgess [27:43]
  • “A robot may not injure a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm...”
    — Sponsor/Advertiser, reciting Asimov’s Three Laws [28:52]
• Asimov’s template becomes gospel, both in fiction and in how real-world robotics communities and media discuss ethics.
• The blending of science and fiction is considered unique and powerful:
  • “It would be like Jules Verne writes about submarines and also talks about...mutually assured destruction from submarine borne nuclear warheads.”
    — Sponsor/Advertiser [31:55]

Sci-Fi as Precursor to Scientific Innovation

• Sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Lucas inspire technologies like communication satellites and even the naming of real-life prosthetic devices ("Luke Arm").
• But the faith in science fiction can also lead to real-world harm when the boundaries blur (e.g., tech scandals such as Theranos).

The Final Irony & Enduring Legacy

• Čapek almost certainly would not have endorsed a society in which robots threatened the dignity of human work.
  • “Over a hundred years later, the invention truly has turned on its creator.”
    — Alana Casanova Burgess [33:54]
• The “robot” thus lives on as both warning and inspiration, the product of a singular moment, but ever more relevant as technology advances.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The word robot was invented for this play.” — Narrator/Researcher [04:36]
• “You are not as strong as the robots. You are not as skillful as the robots. The robots can do everything. You only give orders. You do nothing but talk.” — Radius in RUR, paraphrased by Alana Casanova Burgess [16:36]
• “The robot rebellion seems like a tired science fiction trope. But to the audiences who watched Čapek’s play for the first time, this was brand new stuff.” — Narrator/Researcher [17:44]
• “A robot may not injure a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm...” — Sponsor/Advertiser, Asimov’s Laws [28:52]
• “Asimov is doing robo-psychology before computers can play tic-tac-toe, before a robot can fold a shirt.” — Sponsor/Advertiser [32:25]
• “Science fiction has led the way on a number of real-life advancements.” — Alana Casanova Burgess [32:44]
• “When Karel Čapek conceived of robots, he was definitely not aiming to inspire the AI era based on his belief in the dignity and value of human work. Čapek likely would not approve of our robots.” — Alana Casanova Burgess [33:54]

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Timeline of Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------------| | [02:03] | Introduction to RUR and scene-setting in Berlin | | [04:36] | The etymology and initial impact of the word "robot" | | [06:18] | Čapek’s influences and early life | | [12:08] | Cultural roots of "robotnik" and societal context | | [13:06] | Description of biological robots in RUR | | [14:15] | Human dehumanization of robots; Helena's activism | | [15:27] | Robots in war; escalation to rebellion | | [16:36] | Radius's revolt and the play's apocalyptic ending | | [17:58] | The play’s critical reception and American adaptation | | [20:00] | Metal robots: the shift in representation and impact | | [23:12] | Difference between RUR robots and past automatons | | [25:56] | "Metropolis," film legacy, and pop culture contagion | | [27:32] | Isaac Asimov’s response and the Three Laws of Robotics | | [30:17] | Asimov’s Laws influence real-world robotics | | [31:19] | Modern echoes—James Cameron invokes the Three Laws | | [32:44] | Sci-fi as a driver for actual technology, both good and bad| | [33:54] | Final reflections on Čapek's legacy and unintended consequences|

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Conclusion

This rich episode traces the journey of "robot" from a footnote in a Czech play to a defining concept in world culture—shaping how we imagine, build, and worry about artificial life. With storytellers and scientists quoting each other across generations, the line between speculative fiction and real robotics blurs—making RUR’s legacy as relevant, instructive, and cautionary as ever.

Transcript

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[Narrator/Researcher]

original podcast

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

History this Week March 29, 1923 I'm Alana Casanova Burgess. The glitzy Kerfurstedam Theater is packed with well dressed Berliners. The theater is new and so is the play. Well, it's new to this German audience at least. It's been lighting up stages across Europe and the US for two years now. The lights go down and the curtains open on two actors in a familiar scene. A boss and his secretary at the office.

[Narrator/Researcher]

The executive who is powerful and important enough to have a private secretary, you know, leans back in his chair and says take a letter and dictates something that provides all the exposition that the audience needs to get things going.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

This is Seton Hill Professor Dennis Jurs, who has been Teaching this play in his English and media classes for years, he says this would have been a familiar trope, an office comedy. But this version comes with a twist. The boss, Harry, rattles off a long letter, getting the audience up to speed. But while Harry's going on and on, the secretary Sulla is acting a little off.

[Narrator/Researcher]

She's sitting at a typewriter, still and placid and immobile, simply listening to the boss's words.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

The audience wonders, why isn't she typing? She's missing all his dictation. Is something wrong with Sulla?

[Narrator/Researcher]

Harry finishes his entire letter, and then in seconds, she frantically types out the entire letter, pulls out the paper and says, finished. Next letter.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

The letter is perfect. No typos, no words missed in just a few seconds. Because despite her very human appearance, Sulla and many characters will meet like her, are not human. The play is called Verstant's Universal Robots. In this version, they've translated the title character's name from the original Czech Rossum's Universal Robots. Rur for short. The title character's name doesn't really matter, but another word in the title is very important.

[Narrator/Researcher]

When I was researching technology in American drama, all the scholarship that I looked at had a little footnote about this odd little play called R U R. The footnote always said, this is the source of the word robot. The word robot was invented for this play.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

The German version, premiering tonight in this Berlin theater, is groundbreaking in many ways. The avant garde set design is the breakout work of a major 20th century architect. The production incorporates film projection in ways that no play has ever done before. But Rur's enduring legacy and the thing that captivates audiences around the world is this new word that's never been used. Robot. An animatronic humanoid with its own autonomy, capable of independent thought. Action. And as our onstage boss Harry will unfortunately find out, violent rebellion today, Robot fever takes the world by storm and creates a new vision for the future. How did our help set down rules that still guide the tech industry today? And has the invention turned on its creator? The author of Rur, the playwright Carol Chapek, was born in 1890 and grew up in the mountains of Bohemia in the modern day Czech Republic. Early on, he was exposed to the mechanics of the human body.

[Narrator/Researcher]

Chapek's father was a doctor. He would go around the countryside making house calls, and young Carl would follow along with his dad. And he kind of learned an appreciation for what science can do for people, caring for people in that situation. His mother was more Humanist. She was into folklore, told him fairy tales.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

By the time he's 24, Chapek is a young writer emerging onto the Czech literary scene. He works with his writing partner and brother Joseph. And you can really see those early fairy tale influences in the works that first make them famous.

[Narrator/Researcher]

Illustrated stories about puppies and kittens that were kind of as popular in his day and his country as, you know, Paddington the Bear in England or Mickey Mouse in America.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Not the sort of author that you'd expect to write about a dystopian robot rebellion. But according to Professor Jurs, there were signs.

[Narrator/Researcher]

The puppy characters and the cat characters were playful and also bitingly satirical. Characters that mocked the human tendency to, like, follow rules and do bureaucracy.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Bureaucracy might seem like a bizarre subject for a children's book, but Coppock and Czech society as a whole were really steeped in the idea that industrialization and the bureaucracy that came with it was at best new and weird and at worst, a violent threat. See, Czech regions had abolished serfdom in the mid-1800s. In just one generation, much of the Czech working class went from toiling in the fields to working in factories and offices. Working class people were happy to leave the feudal system behind. But this new style of work was an adjustment. It felt deeply removed from the natural world, soulless even. Then, in 1914, World War I hits. Chapek himself doesn't fight. He has a medical exemption. But all of Europe witnesses the horrors of this new mechanized style of warfare. All of this serfdom and labor exploitation, the awkward transition to industrialized work, the carnage of mechanized warfare. It's all swirling around the Czech zeitgeist. In 1920, when Chopek and his brother start working on a new sci fi play, Rossum's Universal Robots.

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Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full [e-mail] RUR is set in a factory on a private island where reclusive inventor Rossum has figured out how to fabricate synthetic humans. These inventions are called robots, a word that Chapek's brother makes up, but it has a pretty powerful origin.

[Narrator/Researcher]

The word Robotnik meant a serf that owed forced labor to their master, and would have been a term that cut deep into the psyche of a community that only a generation or two ago had been totally controlled by this the system of serfdom.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Harry the human Executive We Meet in the first scene is the plant manager. These robots are being factory produced on assembly lines and shipped around the world for menial labor. What Professor Jurs calls the 3Ds, the

[Narrator/Researcher]

dirty, dangerous and dull labor of robots. It's a very strong sales pitch. Humans will be free of the labor, they'll be free of drudgery.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

But these robots are not the Tin man machines that we're used to imagining. They're lab grown flesh, not metal.

[Narrator/Researcher]

We hear Harry describe mills where bones are fabricated in like spinning factories where nerves are spun. These were factory. Harry built humans from a chemical substitute for living protoplasm. These characters were biological, that is, not buckets of bolts.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

These synthetic beings are largely indistinguishable from real humans. They can perform independent tasks. They can reach logical conclusions. But importantly, Harry tells us, they do not have souls. They can't feel pain. The perfect worker, like Sulla, Harry's robot secretary, who is interrupted from her rapid letter writing by Helena Glory, a young woman who barges into Harry's office. She's the daughter of the factory president and an avid robot rights advocate. She confronts Harry about the robot's treatment. How does he know that they don't have souls? They deserve more respect. But even Helena the activist can't see the robots as full people.

[Narrator/Researcher]

She describes how her town council has bought some robots as street sweepers. And she corrects herself. She tries to say, oh no, they were hired. She slips. She initially says bought the dehumanizing term.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Helena doesn't have much success in her campaign. The company does ultimately give the robots pain sensors so they can protect themselves from harmony. But that's more about safeguarding company assets than anything else. Then the play flashes forward 10 years. We're in a dystopian reality. Robots have completely supplanted actual humans in all kinds of jobs. Without work, the humans feel they have no real purpose and have stopped reproducing. Universities circulate petitions to restrict robot production, but. But they're quickly overruled by RUR shareholders. Robots aren't just convenient anymore, they're necessary. Especially because RUR has started producing robot soldiers. Governments are clamoring for more mechanized soldiers to fight in their human wars.

[Narrator/Researcher]

And one of the kind of brilliant, if you want to call it brilliant, kind of twisted ways that they can continue to make robots marketable is that they want to market robots that have different racial and facial and cultural identities and that speak different languages so that these robots will continue to fight each other the way humans do.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Robots are either working until they fall apart, or they're on Killing Fields. And the models that can now feel pain start to experience a malfunction that the creators call the robot Cramp, which actually just means the robot rebellion.

[Narrator/Researcher]

The robot who throws down his tools and says, I don't want to work. There's a robot called Radius, who Helena, the human learns, has had the robot cramped and is going to be destroyed. This is the robot that that Helena placed in the library. Radius, the robot, has been educating himself by reading human books.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Radius, the robot, arrives at the conclusion that humanity is no longer necessary. In fact, it's a parasite on the robot race who are doing all the work. He says, you are not as strong as the robots. You are not as skillful as the robots. The robots can do everything. You only give orders. You do nothing but talk. Radius manages to escape destruction and leads a violent revolt that ends in the extinction of the human race. In the final scene, the last surviving human, a working class builder, talks to two of the robots, a male and a female. He calls them Adam and Eve and tells them to go on to do what they will with the world. The robots leave arm in arm. The curtain closes. RUR is a hit with audiences. They've never seen anything like this.

[Narrator/Researcher]

The robot rebellion seems like a tired science fiction trope. But to the audiences who watched Chapek's play for the first time, this was brand new stuff.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

But the play gets middling reviews from critics. One says it goes on for three acts, too jokily, too pointedly, too drawn out, and yet quite bound to general petty bourgeois conventionality. Karel Chapek has a good idea. Then the gods abandon him. Word of the robot play quickly makes its way to the US And a little over a year after its small Czech premiere, RUR debuts on Broadway in New York City. But this version features some very notable alterations to the plot. The ending is changed. Rather than two robots walking off into the sunset, the play closes on two young people, implicitly human, finding sanctuary from the robot revolution at an abandoned cottage in the desert. Maybe they thought Robot Apocalypse was too cynical for a Broadway audience. But perhaps even more importantly, the robots themselves have changed. In this version, the robots still resemble humans, but they are getting a pretty distinctive look.

[Narrator/Researcher]

They have, like, bowl haircuts. They look like Mr. Spock, but also kind of like Neanderthal humans. They're tough, they're tall, they're big, and they're hunched over. They have this shuffling gait that physical embodiment of.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

You are looking at a worker later adaptations follow suit. The robots become even less human. They start wearing metallic clothing, more machine like by the end of the decade. Rur's robots are very different from Choppick's original vision.

[Narrator/Researcher]

When RUR had a revival in New York six or seven years later, the robot characters were given what looks to me like a tinfoil hat and flared boots that look like something out of a Flash Gordon series.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

This shift from synthetic humans to metal machines might seem like a gimmick, but it's a turning point that changes the concept of robots, the arc of science fiction, and the future of tech forever.

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[Sponsor/Advertiser]

it would ingest pellets and then excrete. If you think about it now, it's like that's a really pretty low bar to say we've created life.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

At the time though, artificial life was individual one off inventions like an excreting duck or the mechanical turk, a chess playing robot that seemingly couldn't be beat.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Jefferson wanted to play it, Napoleon wanted to play it. The tech bros of the time wanted to test themselves against this mechanical entity that was not mechanical at all.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Actually, the mechanical turk turned out to

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be the grandmaster who was a very small stature inside a box.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

The robots in RUR were in some ways just the latest version of mechanical beings. So why did this one stick? Well, according to Professor Jordan, some of it had to do with how well the play was received by audiences.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

It was one of the 20th century's most produced stage plays. So this wasn't some sort of little boutique art, you know, avant garde theater in the corner of Eastern Europe is like worldwide. People said this is hitting a nerve.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

The beginning of the 20th century was a huge turning point in the way humans lived and worked all around the world. A major wave of industrialization brought steel and electricity and assembly lines into the workforce. Then World War I's machines created carnage on an entirely new scale. And this violence was brought to major European cities, hubs of culture and enlightenment.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

The world of learning and humanities and arts is now running headlong into this world of steel and battleships and mustard gas.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

So audiences around the world were primed for a play that critiqued mechanization. But the thing that set the robot apart from any other automaton that came

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

before was not the Tin man up there. These were human beings playing robots. So the robots were indistinguishable from flesh and blood.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

The world had seen automatons before, but they were always one off oddities, clearly distinguishable from a real human. But the robots of RUR are distinctly human. Like even when the later adaptations get creative and add metal hats or Flash Gordon boots, the robots still look like people. And they also mirror humans in scale. They're an entire race capable of extinguishing all of humanity. And that idea really takes hold. RUR is still in its heyday when another major robot story comes onto the scene. Metropolis, one of the last major silent films, comes out of Germany in 1927. It's arguably the single most impactful science fiction film of all time. If you picture a typical sci fi scene, a rainy futuristic megacity, towering art deco skyscrapers, endless lines of workers shuffling around in unison, you're picturing Metropolis. The movie stars Maria, a beautiful female robot who incites a violent Revolt. Sound familiar? Maria is clearly based on Rur's robots, but there's one important distinction. She's fully metal. Picture a sexy female C3PO.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Maria is in many ways the progenitor of so many other robots. You know, you clearly see George Lucas, you know, borrowing heavily. And you see so many of the common robot tropes that will persist in cinema for the next, you know, century. The rebellion. The robots rise up. The enforced laborers say enough. And are now turned against the humans.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

This version of a robot really sticks. A metal being in human form who may or may not, but most likely will try to kill humans. The trope permeates pop culture throughout the 1930s. Robots appear in pulp fiction novels, advertisements, even in an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon. Oswald and his girlfriend are having a lot of fun at home. Playing the piano, doing magic tricks, juggling eggs. When they're interrupted by a mad scientist. Lots of hijinks ensue, but in the end, Oswald rescues his girlfriend from the scientist's malfunctioning robot. Then a helpful goat headbutts it to pieces. So Radius anti human revolt in Rur birthed 1000 killer robots. They dominate the sci fi scene for a decade until another sci fi giant enters the scene. Isaac Asimov, one of the most prolific writers in the genre.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

500 books, 3 degrees from Columbia. I think all of them were in chemistry. So clearly a smart guy, really. One of the founding authors of US science fiction.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

And much like Chopek, he starts writing science fiction in the midst of a world war. The second one,

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

he's seeing the mechanization of war at a whole other level compared to what Capek did. And I don't think it's just coincidence that they're both reacting to mechanized warfare of previously unfathomable destruction, culminating in the the atomic attacks on Japan.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

But unlike Chopek, Asimov resents this killer robot trope. He even says publicly that he thinks RUR is a terrible play. But he can't totally escape Chopek's influence. His first hit is a series of pulp fiction short stories called I Robot. Chapek's creation is right there in the title. Except the robot protagonist is deeply loyal to humans. It's his defining trait. Because Robbie the Robot is hard coded to follow three explicitly stated rules.

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One, a robot may not injure a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except to where such orders conflict with the first law. Three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with either the first or second law.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

So basically, first and foremost, a robot can't harm a human ever. It must obey orders unless those orders would harm a human. And lastly, it must protect itself as long as doing so doesn't break either of the first two rules. Later on, Asimov adds another broader reaching law. He calls it the Zero Law.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

A robot may not harm humanity or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

These rules become known as the three laws of Robotics. Chapek invented the word robot. Asimov invents robotics and his laws become foundational to robots. And not just in sci fi. When science catches up to fiction in the late 20th century, Asimov's laws are still treated as gospel by real human scientists.

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One of the foremost roboticists in the world was named Rodney Brooks, an Australian who worked at MIT.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Brooks is the the founder of iRobot, a robotics company named after Asimov Stories. It's the company that gave us the Roomba vacuum. It also makes bomb squad robots for war zones.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

And he has to defend his very proto robots in the 80s against charges that, well, you didn't follow Asimov's Law. It's like, since when is a science fiction book a design mandate for an electromechanical device?

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Asimov's Laws persist to this day. At the 2024 AI and Robotics Summit in Washington D.C. director James Cameron delivered a special message. He spoke virtually picture Cameron's giant head projected 1984 style above the audience. And in his speech he addresses the ethical framework for AI and robotics, saying,

[Narrator/Researcher]

we have the answer from the great prophet Isaac Asimov in his three laws of Robotics. A robot may not injure a human

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

being or through an action, a Hollywood director telling robotic experts how to think about their work. It's this mingling of science and fiction that Professor Jordan says is the real story of Chapek Asimov. Robots and science fiction in general. The idea that robotics and tech, a very real branch of science, cites fiction as a foundational guide. That's pretty unique.

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It would be like Jules Verne writes about submarines and also talks about, oh yeah, they're going to carry nuclear warheads and float around the world undetectably and that if our enemies launch a nuclear attack, will respond from these submarines. So if Jules Verne had come up with mutually assured destruction from submarine borne nuclear warheads. The other example, and I heard this from a tech bro way back when it said, imagine the advantage frequent flyer program being invented before the airplane like the Wright Brothers didn't think of frequent flyer programs. No, for good reasons. They did. And yet Asimov is doing robo psychology before computers can play tic tac toe before a robot can fold a shirt.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Science fiction has led the way on a number of real life advancements. Communication satellites were first proposed in the 1940s by Arthur Clarke, another sci fi giant. Clarke also wrote a short story in the 1960s that featured a global network of computers. It helped inspire the Internet, and it's still happening today. In 2014, the FDA approved the Luke Arm, a robotic prosthetic arm capable of performing fine motor skills. The name officially stands for Life under Kinetic Evolution, L U K E though it's really a nod to Luke Skywalker's metal hand in Star Wars. But this faith in sci fi that if something exists on paper, it can exist in real life, has also led to real harm. Think Theranos and crypto crashes.

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I do think that there's a sense that, you know, you can't understand what I see, you can't understand what I'm doing, so you need to trust me to do it because I'm capable of doing it.

[Alana Casanova Burgess]

Whether you're a believer or a skeptic, one thing is for certain. When Karel Chapek conceived of robots, he was definitely not aiming to inspire the AI era based on his belief in the dignity and value of human work. Chapek likely would not approve of our robots. And so, over a hundred years later, the invention truly has turned on its creator. History this Week is a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things History this week, Sign [e-mail] and follow us on Instagram History this Week podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions, send us an [e-mail] Special thanks to our guests, Dennis Jers, professor of English and Media at Seton Hill University, and John Jordan, author of the MIT Press book Robots. And thanks to Yitka Chekova, editor of the book RUR and the Vision of Artificial Life. She helped us understand the man and science behind Rur. This episode was produced by McCamey Lynn, sound designed by Ben Dickstein and hosted by me, Alana Casanova Burgess for Back Pocket Studios. Our executive producer is Ben Dickstein from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate and review History this Week wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.