Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), not only gave us the term "robot" (from the Czech for forced...

Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), not only gave us the term "robot" (from the Czech for forced labor or compulsory drudgery), but also gives both a precis of its implications for labor (the illusory promise of leisure and the actuality of loss) and a fantasy of "artificial intelligence" as another kind of sentient being. In Capek's play, the head of the company that manufactures robots promises that they will eliminate poverty and free everyone from work and into creative fulfillment, but unemployed workers rise up against the robots, until the government arms the robots, leading to more wars. The end of the play offers a Pinnochio turn, with robots acquiring souls. Decades of such stories--in which the audience is invited to recognize that android-hunting Blade Runners are killers, to sympathize with Lieutenant Data as a Real Boy, or to fear the clever malevolence of a Terminator--have primed us for the myth that generally intelligent computing, (Artificial G...