How did we, humans that is, get interested in Robots?
Just How did we get interested in robots...and robot vacuums
I think the answer may lie in the fact that we're human.
Because we're human we imagine.
And what we imagine we tend to invent. Eventually!
The idea of a self propelling, thinking machine has been around for hundreds of years. Do you recall the stories of the Arabian Nights and the Enchanted Horse? There, with magic, was a robot of sorts.
And folk tales abound with references to clockwork or mechanical men and animals. However we did not really think of them as robots. Why not? Because the word robot had not yet been brought into common usage.
We owe that debt to Karel ÄŒapek, the Czech writer who used the term in his play R.U.R.(Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920. However, Karel did not invent the word, that honour goes to his brother Josef.
In Czech. robota means drudgery or drudge, hard work, and in fact the peasants were called robotniks.
And really it all started from there - off to the realms of science fiction and then to science fact.
Not just the iRobot Roomba, but the industrial robots that first emerged in 1961 and now used everywhere to automate production. Indeed, the industrial robot is probably the legacy of science fiction... We imagined...we invented...We built upon our knowledge and inventions.
Now, fascinatingly, robots don't just need to be hardare, not just the industrial robot. They can be software as well ... we call them bots and they are used to crawl the web (hence the other name spiders).
But there are other software bots, like the trading robot. The trading robot is used by people who want to make money trading on the stockmarkets whether its a trading robot for foreign exchange or for emerging markets etf.
Robots of any type make good Christmas Presents.
