1 “Robot” comes from the Czech word robota, meaning“drudgery,” and first appeared in the 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The drama ends badly when the machines rise up and kill their creators, leaving a sole lonely survivor.
2 They say it was an accident. The first known case of robot homicide occurred in 1981, when a robotic arm crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.
3 More than a million industrial robots are now in use, nearly half of them in Japan.
