Robot vs Automaton

Read some litarature then ;) E.t.a Hoffmann for example, The Sandman.

Come to think of it i read that in english, so obviously the term is used in english to signify something that has some will.
 
may be. he may as well have used a rather new word for a rather uncommon/new concept.

whatever, it was 200 years ago, it didnt stick.
 
I was listening to Orff's O Fortuna, and one of the lyrics is "semper in angaria" which is latin for "always enslaved". Angaria is a word used in greek (although it is not greek) and means a state where one has to do something without willing to do it. So this, again, seems similar to Robota, and would mean that the robot has will and moreover is against its master :)
 
No, since automaton literrally means "it that has a will of its own". Moreover, at least in german, i have read about it being clearly something that has a free will, to a degree.
Perhaps it is just in legal jargon that it means having no will, although Machinae's example did not convince me that it meant that, since it seems it meant simply that it has a diminished capacity of free will in relation to a regular human (and that obviously is the case with automaton anyway) ;)

I suppose I take my definition of automaton from computer science, which is what I studied in university.
 
Could it be like the french/ saxon thing in english? Beef/ Cow and all that.

Well, it's probably just a case of both languages having similar (Slavic) roots. At one point proto-Czech and proto-Polish were probably incredibly close, and at one point they must have been the same language (proto-Slavic?). In southern Poland there are tons of dialects (spoken by Górale) that are varying degrees away from Polish and varying degrees closer to Czech or Slovak.

Both languages have evolved a lot since, so you do end up with funny coincidences, like zapach, which in Polish means any sort of smell, but in Czech meals a foul odour. There are probably other examples in other Slavic languages, but Polish and Slovak are pretty close as far as languages go, and Czech and Slovak are incredibly close, so we share a lot of words, even if they don't always mean the exact same thing.
 
It did stick in the english translation, which im sure is not from 200 years ago :lol:

wait, the english translation of a 200 year old german book tells you what "automat" means in modern german?

how is that even possible?



this is what we call a "chewing gum automat":

Der_Automat_1_Bro..jpg


this is what we call a cola automat:

coca_cola_automat.jpg
 
I'd never heard of 'corvee' before, so I looked it up. The term appears to be more for the French, while 'indenture' would probably be the more common English term.
Nah, we use the word corvée as well, because it's a feudal legal obligation without recompense. Theoretically, an indentured worker (who must have done something to become indentured in the first place, unlike peasants who had to perform corvée no matter what because they were peasants) would be able to work off the debt that caused him to become indentured in the first place; you can't work off corvée.
 
:lol: at a recommendation to "read some literature" from the guy who didn't know where "robot" came from in the first place. It's probably precisely because the word "robot" was used more in literature and that it spread - though being shorter and being more easily able to be formed into other parts of speech/related words probably helped.
 
Don't act like my recommendation was hostile ;) Obviously one cannot know all literature, and i have not read any czech.

I would bet, to be on-topic again ( ;) ) that the main reason of the rise of "robot" and the decline of "automaton" as the term describing androids and other such entities was that automaton came to signify simpler machines, and not at all something possesing a will. However its real meaning is very different from that, as already mentioned in the OP :)
 
Well, in modern settings, it seems to me that the definitions are somewhat like this:

Automat(-on/-ic): A more or less intelligent machine that is built into other structures or otherwise is in a constant location, which doesn't have any manipulative limbs.

Robot: A more or less intelligent machine that has at least one manipulative limb or the possibility of self-propulsion.

Android: A more or less intelligent machine that has a structure, and usually a size, resembling a human being with four limbs.


The most difficult question is always what intelligence is, and how much of something is needed before a machine can be considered intelligent...
 
Hi Varwnos

Perhaps the most famous automata is Vaucanson's mechanical duck.

He used a rotating drum with pegs in it to control the movements of the clockwork duck (like a drum in a music box or one of those automatic pianos) and was able to fool people that the duck had some independence because the duck seemed to behave randomly.

I'd suggest that people had (or have) no real notion of what separates life from death and the animate from the inanimate, and the automata (clockwork) and the robot (machines) are just two ideas that are products of their time using the cutting edge technology or knowledge of their time, to examine this divide between life and not-life. Other examples you may be familiar with are Frankenstein (electricity) and the hypnotised corpse (spiritualism/hynotism) from 'the facts in the case of M. Valdamar' story by Poe. Closer to our own time we have Skynet (software) 'which becomes self aware' and turns on its creator, just like the Golem and frankenstein's monster did in their time. :)
 
in our ukraine they call their skin , shkura.
when in other languages sshkura means hides, like animal hides. :/
it is becaus ukraine is southerly and their sun makes their skin more like dark hides.

ps. I like robot. When it is pronounced robot.
Not Row-bot
 
Random trivia: In Čapek R.U.R. robots are biological being, not machines.
 
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