The word robot comes from Karel Čapek's 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots. It's built from the Czech robata — forced labor — itself from the Old Church Slavonic rabu, meaning slave. I've been thinking about that etymology a lot watching the current AI discourse, which has turned into a pretty consistent pattern of goalpost-moving dressed up as skepticism. It's not intelligent, then it finds a genuinely novel solution to an 80-year-old Erdős problem. It's not useful, then it solves the protei...