Word: robots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nightmare of man being destroyed by a creature of his own making has always been with us. The first robot in literature was the Golem, a clay man made by the High Rabbi Lev Ben Bezalel of Prague in the 16th century. Animated by a slip of paper bearing the name of God, it murdered the Rabbi when he made it work on the Sabbath. The Biblical analog is the Tower of Babel, the presumptuous construction that called down God's wrath on man. But the Golem and the Tower of Babel are myths. Computers are real...
...another sector of Nixon's politico-cybernetic system, still more machines type automatically "personalized" letters composed by dialing a selection from some 70 paragraphs by Nixon. Robot typewriters transform coded commands from a tape into letters that answer questions raised by concerned citizens. To a voter worried about the cities, for example, the robots write: "Of the many challenges facing America today, none seem more critical than solving the crisis that faces our cities and urban areas." The letters are mailed to voters who have given the candidate a tape-recorded three-minute piece of their mind...
...from the moment they enter. At the door, they find that their bodies have been sighted by an electric eye, which in turn triggers the computer-generated voice that welcomes them in a deep monotone. They may be approached by R.O.S.A. (Radio Operated Simulated Actress) Bosom, a roving electronic robot who actually appeared with live performers in a 1966 London production of The Three Musketeers (R.O.S.A. played the Queen of France...
Shaking Hands. Many of the machines promise to pay for themselves in labor-cost savings in as little as two years. For some applications, it is more economical to rent. One Unimation rent-a-robot plan costs the user $2.70 per hour for the first 500 hours and $1.70 thereafter. Moreover, notes Company Vice Chairman Norman I. Schafler, the tireless robots "take no lunches or coffee breaks and do not care about working more than one shift...
Organized labor has not exactly welcomed the new machines. The robot, complains a United Automobile Workers official, can "even be programmed to shake hands. Presumably it could be set up to shake hands to say goodbye to the people it replaces." Yet in many cases, the people the robots replace are glad. Caterpillar Tractor Co. uses a Unimation-made robot to feed steel pins into furnaces, a tedious task that workmen heretofore had to perform with long-handled tongs. "The work is hot and repetitive," says a Caterpillar spokesman. "For the worker, it was just not desirable." For the robot...