It proceeds from the Czech robota, interpreted as ‘forced labor’ or ‘serfdom’, referring to the feudal practice in which serfs were required to fulfill a quota of obligatory and unpaid work for their lords, generally two or three days a week, in effect throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1848. The root is traced to Proto-Slavic *orbъ, which through metathesis derived into the forms rob and rab, denoting ‘slave’ or ‘servant’, with origins in the Proto-Indo-European *orbh-, meaning ‘to change status’, ‘to separate’, associated with the reduction in condition suffered by the orphan and the slave, from which precisely the word orphan derives (observed in the Greek orphanós, ὀρφανός). From the same Slavic semantic field emerge the Russian работа (rabota, for ‘work’), раб (rab, for ‘slave’) and рабство (rabstvo, for ‘slavery’), as well as the German Arbeit (for ‘work’), related through the Germanic *arbējiđiz and the Gothic arbaiÞs, sharing the primordial connotation of ‘effort’, ‘hardship’ or ‘difficulty’.

The word was conceived by Czech painter and writer Josef Čapek (1887–1945), who suggested it to his brother Karel Čapek (1890–1938) when the latter was searching for a name for the artificial creatures in his theatrical play. Karel had initially considered calling them Laboři, a neologism derived from the Latin labor, meaning ‘work’, but Josef proposed roboti, deriving it from robota, whose cultural and social weight resonated with greater depth in the Czech language. Thus, R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, Rossum’s Universal Robots) premiered on January 25, 1921, in Hradec Králové, Czechoslovakia, and by 1923 had already been translated into thirty languages, establishing the term in the global vocabulary. Josef’s life, regrettably, would come to a tragic end when he was killed at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

It must be noted that the robots of the play were not metallic machines as we conceive them today, but rather biologically manufactured beings, assembled in a factory, capable of thought and practically indistinguishable from humans, yet devoid of soul and emotions. Created to liberate humanity from manual labor, these beings eventually develop a rudimentary consciousness that leads them to rebel against their creators, culminating in the extinction of the human race. Čapek’s work constitutes, in essence, a warning against the dangers of dehumanization and technological abuse, a premonition that acquires an unsettling relevance in the age of artificial intelligence.

In 1950, the American writer of Russian origin Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) expanded the conceptual universe of the robot with his work I, Robot, introducing the celebrated Three Laws of Robotics. On the industrial front, in 1961, George Devol and Joseph Engelberger put into operation the Unimate, the first industrial robot, integrated into the General Motors assembly line, marking the beginning of factory automation.

Among the words associated with the Proto-Indo-European root *orbh-, one may highlight: orphan (from the Greek orphanós), and through the Slavic branch, the forms robota in Polish and Slovak, работа in Russian and Bulgarian, and the Czech výroba (meaning ‘production’). From robot, the term robotics is configured (combining robot with the Greek suffix -ική, -ikḗ, denoting a discipline or science), and android (given in the Greek androeidḗs, formed by anḗr, andrós, meaning ‘man’, and -eidḗs, meaning ‘form’).