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Every Roomba, every factory arm, every robot in every science fiction movie ever made, all of them are walking around carrying an old Czech word for slavery inside their name, and almost no one who uses the word every day knows it. Before 1920, the word "robot" did not exist. In any language, artificial humans and stories were called automations or androids, Greek roots for self-moving and man-like. Then a Czech writer named Karel Čapek sat down to write a play. The country he was riding in years old. Čakoslovakia had just been carved out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The First World War had ended. Mechanical and chemical warfare had shown what industrial-scale machines could do to human beings. Čapek wanted to write about it. His play was called RUR, "Rossom's Universal Robots." It opens in a factory that manufactures artificial workers from synthetic biological materials. The factory sells them by the millions to do every kind of dull, dangerous, exhausting labor that humans no longer want to do. In the third act, the artificial workers rise up and wipe out humanity. Chappek originally wanted to call his manufactured workers "LeBore" from the Latin word for "labor." He thought it sounded fake. He turned to his older brother, Yosef, a writer and an artist and asked him for a better word. Yosef thought about it for a minute and said, "Roboti." From the Czech word, "Robota." Robota meant the forced labor of a medieval surf owed his landlord. Unpaid work by the law, just for the right to live on the Lord's land. From an older root-rab, meaning slave, the Czech surfdom system had been abolished in 1848. The word's still in the language. The play opened in Prague in January 1921. By 1923, it had been translated into 30 languages. The word "robot" displayed automation in Android in nearly every one of them. And here's the part history rarely tells you. Karel Čepek became one of the loudest anti-fascist voices in 1930s Europe. The Nazis put him on a death list. He died of pneumonia in December 1938 weeks before they could arrest him. His brother, Yosef, the man who actually invented the word "robot" was captured. He died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The man who gave the world a word for forced labor died inside the system built on it. Words carry the weight of the worlds they come from from. Air Learn is built for people who want to know what they're actually saying. Check it out.

Every Roomba, every factory arm, every robot in every science fiction movie ever made, all of them are walking around carrying an old Czech word for slavery in…