Excerpt:

According to Lisa Yaszek, a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, the answer goes back decades. “The word ‘robot’ comes from RUR—[the 1921 play] ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’—and the Czech word for a “slave laborer,” she explained. “In the play, we create these biological synthetic humans they call “robots” to do our work, and eventually the robots start killing us off because we’re not useful—we don’t do any work.”

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