Word: robots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...play R.U.R., Czech Author Karel Capek, the man who coined the term robot, conjured up an army of mechanical monsters that succeeded in taking over the world. Today milder, real-life versions of such creatures are starting to find places in factories and plants, and what they are taking over is a number of industry's most toilsome chores. Unlike other automated machinery, which is usually stationary and must be manned by production workers, these so-called industrial robots can be moved from job to job and programmed to perform tasks virtually on their...
...typical robot is outrigged with a hydraulic arm that, mounted on a desk-like base, is capable of reaching out, seizing industrial material and moving it from one spot to another. The two leading U.S. manufacturers of first-generation robots are Connecticut-based Unimation Inc. (a subsidiary of Pullman Inc.) and AMF Thermatool, Inc., of New Rochelle, N.Y. (a subsidiary of AMF Co.), which between them have about 140 of their surrealistic creations (price range: $18,000 to $25,000) operating in plants at home and abroad. With the robots proving their worth in one industry after another...
...Macon, Ga., the Burns Brick Co. uses two robots to handle 8,000 bricks an hour, a work load ordinarily requiring seven men; each of the robots plucks eight bricks at a time off a table, then drops them gently onto cars carrying them to kilns for baking. General Motors employs a robot to move heated steering linkage rods into forging dies. Ford uses one to paint engines, while robots at Corning Glass Works pick up dinnerware after it has been decorated and put it onto a conveyor belt...
Biting Satire. These days, Czechoslovakia's writers specialize in biting satire on Communist bureaucracy. Their work is in the tradition of Kafka and Karel Capek, whose play R.U.R. first introduced the concept of a robot. In The Memorandum, a popular play by Vaclav Havel, the main character gets an important memorandum in an impenetrable official language; in order to get permission to learn the language, he must first write a petition in it. One of the biggest hits of the Prague theater season, The Labyrinth by Ladislav Smoček, shows men imprisoned in a maze of park pathways...
...Thinking" computers, based on random functions, exist today. These machines, programmed to learn by trial and error as humans do, are essentially Turing's robot. Hence, Mortimer Adler's argument is obsolete-and man's uniqueness again becomes questionable...