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It backwards: first common application of the technology gave it the name.

Like in one of the Stanisław Lem's stories about Ijon Tichy people call intelligent anthropomorphic robots washing machines.




You'll be delighted to hear that traffic signals are called "robots" in South Africa.


That itself reminded me, that the word "robot" comes from "robota, rabota" which means "to work, worker" in a lot of slavic languages (My native language is bulgarian).

From the dictionary:

robot, origin: from Czech, from robota ‘forced labor.’ The term was coined in K. Čapek's play R.U.R. ‘Rossum's Universal Robots’ (1920).

https://www.google.com/search?q=robot+definition


Rossum is a riff on "rozum" which means reason (as in to reason about).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.#Origin_of_the_word


"Thinker's Universal Workers"?




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