Here’s a trivia note for you: Domis Plugge (1897-1982) is possibly the first person to play a robot in the US, in the first 1922 Broadway adaptation of “RUR.” He normally acted under the name of “Daniel Poole.” In real life, he was a professor of the Department of Speech and Theater, Hunter College in NYC. Also in this production was Henry Travers, best known for playing Clarence the Angel, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Edit: However, but without a script, I can’t determine who appears first. Actor Myrtland LaVarre [aka John Merton] is the main robot. The accompanying drawing in the press account has a passing resemblance to the 1931 Frankenstein creation.
Mary Bonestell played the female robot Sulla and she speaks before Marius.
Domin. (Dictating) Ready?
Sulla. Yes.
Domin. To E. M. McVicker & Co., Southampton, England. “We undertake no guarantee for goods damaged in transit. As soon as the consignment was taken on board we drew your captain’s attention to the fact that the vessel was unsuitable for the transportation of Robots; and we are therefore not responsible for spoiled freight. We beg to remain, for Rossum’s Universal Robots, yours truly.” (Sulla types the lines.) Ready?
Sulla. Yes.
Domin. Another letter. To the E. B. Huysen Agency, New York, U.S.A. “We beg to acknowledge receipt of order for five thousand Robots. As you are sending your own vessel, please dispatch as cargo equal quantities of soft and hard coal for R.U.R., the same to be credited as part payment (BUZZER) of the amount due us.” (Answering phone) Hello! This is the central office. Yes, certainly. Well, send them a wire. Good. (Rises) “We beg to remain, for Rossum’s Universal Robots, yours very truly.” Ready?
Sulla. Yes.
Domin. (Answering small portable phone) Hello! Yes. No. All right. (Standing back of desk, punching plug machine and buttons) Another letter. Freidrichswerks, Hamburg, Germany. “We beg to acknowledge receipt of order for fifteen thousand Robots.” (Enter Marius R.) Well, what is it?
Marius. There’s a lady, sir, asking to see you.
Domin. A lady? Who is she?
Marius. I don’t know, sir. She brings this card of introduction.
Domin. (Reading card) Ah, from President[11] Glory. Ask her to come in— (To Sulla. Crossing up to her desk, then back to his own) Where did I leave off?
Sulla. “We beg to acknowledge receipt of order for fifteen thousand Robots.”
When a bunch of kids discovered the Lascaux cave paintings, it was their dog who first found the cave opening. The dog’s name was Robot. But in this case, it was diminutive for Robert, with the French diminutive -ot, and indeed pronounced /robo/.
The robot ban will sweep up robot vacuum cleaners too, FCC media relations director Katie Gorscak confirms to The Verge. …
While the government did include “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds” among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.
By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.
The conceit of Blade Runner is that Nexus 6 replicants have minds so advanced that they are (virtually) indistinguishable from actual humans. They only simulate emotional responses but they do it very well. Presumably there are other replicant models out there not so advanced. Talking to one of them might be like talking to Eliza or Siri. But people that use the “basic pleasure models” most likely don’t care. And the soldier class, the assassin class, doesn’t need to have emotions. The false memories were supposed to keep them docile. (Why? Ask Tyrell…oops, you can’t!)
The trouble, the design fault, with Nexus 6 replicants is, after a while, they start to create their own original valid emotional responses. They become, in a sense, aware of who they are. Or, more correctly, what they are. And what they are, are slaves.
Hence the deliberately designed, unchangeable four year life span. They were supposed to cease to function before they became, in the words of the late Tyrell, “more human than human”. You take a mind sophisticated enough to know it is a slave, and put it in a body that is stronger and able to take more physical abuse, (what were they thinking?) and what do you think is going to happen? Replicants do not have the three laws programmed in. Tyrell was predicting they would rise up and kill their masters. And he was right!
Tyrell thought he could control the tiger. Find the balance between having a replicant sophisticated enough to pass for a human, but not go on a murder spree. Events of the film showed he didn’t get the balance right.
The old sf answer was thinking machine. Then came supercomputer or electronic brain. Asimov called his world running robot brains the Machine. AI has now superseded all those.
I checked I, Robot to see what term Asimov used. He has some paragraphs in the last story, “The Evitable Conflict,” I don’t see quoted much but he nailed the situation.
"[T]he Machines are a gigantic extrapolation. Thus - A team of mathematicians work several years calculating a positronic brain equipped to do certain similar acts of calculation. Using this brain they make further calculations to create a still more complicated brain, which they use again to make one still more complicated and so on. According to Silver, what we call the Machines are the result of ten such steps. …
“The Machines are not super-brains in the Sunday supplement sense… It is merely that in their own particular province of collecting and analyzing a nearly infinite number of data and relationships thereof, in nearly infinitesimal time, they have progressed beyond the possibility of detailed human control …”
And the story ends with:
“But you are telling me, Susan, that the 'Society for Humanity” is right, and that Mankind has lost its say in its future."
“It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand - at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society, - having, as they do, that greatest of weapons at their control, the absolute control of our economy.”
That’s set in the year 2065, with a world population of 4.4 billion. Even Asimov was too conservative in his forecasting.
Huh? The quote is missing a few words and describes something physically impossible, not to mention most of the rest of the more ordinary claims are far beyond 2020s tech, much less 1900s tech.
Is this a pull-quote from some fictional work? Or have I been whooshed? Or what?
It’s Nikolas Tesla proposing a radio-controlled boat. I don’t see anything about whatever “It will carry an unlimited which can be aimed with unerring accuracy” refers to.
but the greatest value of my invention will result from its effect upon warfare and armaments, for by reason of its certain and unlimited destructiveness it will tend to bring about and maintain permanent peace among nations.
I haven’t seen anything about “it will act on its own judgment, according to the necessities of the situation”, but I’m not reading the whole thing.
So many sought to get the “weapon so terrible people will no longer dare wage war.”
What they finally got was one so terrible the Great Powers just chose to not use that, prevent if possible “lesser” nations from getting it, and otherwise stick to “regular” warfare using all else and the kitchen sink.