Word: robotized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...assembly systems will use robot technology...
Outside the factory and the lab, the work that needs to be done in this world is almost without limits, and so is the robot's potential ability to do it. In the field of farming and food processing, for example, Unimation has been asked to design a robot that can pluck chickens. Australian technicians are already testing robots to shear sheep. One machine first stuns the animal with an electric shock, then closes in with its shears. Clipping the back and sides is not too hard, but the technicians still report "significant difficulties" in finishing up the neck...
...first automata in actual history were more modest in concept. Archytas of Tarentum (400-350 B.C.) built a wooden dove that was reputed to have flown. In the 2nd century B.C., Hero of Alexandria wrote a book, De Automatis, that described a mechanical theater with robot figures that marched and danced in various temple ceremonies. But the king of all robotmakers was Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (1772-1838), creator of the metronome, who also constructed an automatic orchestra called the Panharmonicon, which could simulate violins, cellos, clarinets, flutes, trumpets, drums, cymbals and triangle. For this contraption, the inventor commissioned Beethoven...
...metal, wood, glass, wax and leather. This creature allegedly opened the door to Albertus' cell at the Dominican monastery in Cologne, asked visitors what they wanted and even engaged them in polite conversation. The end of the legend was that Albertus' celebrated pupil, Thomas Aquinas, smashed the robot to pieces because he considered it demonic. The Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, who was himself considered rather demonic, gave lectures on the creation of a homunculus and even offered a recipe of ingredients, including human blood and putrefied semen. In 16th century Prague, too, the devout Rabbi Judah Loew was reported...
...term robot comes from the Czech word for forced labor and was invented by Karel Capek and popularized in his "fantastic melodrama" of 1921, R.U.R., which stood for Rossum's Universal Robots. These robots look and behave like people and work twice as hard, but since "God hasn't the least notion of modern engineering," as Rossum's general manager puts it, the robots have been built without such impractical attributes as feeling or a soul. First they do all the world's work, then they wage all the world's wars, then they rebel...