Hi, everyone. And welcome back to 【It Means What? 】

Yeah.

Thank you, 安澜. Every time. 欢迎大家回到我们的新板块【词源考古研究所】.

Hi, 安澜.

Hi, Lulu. Hi, everyone.

So 安澜, if I ask you about the hottest topic in the world of technology, what do you think it would be?

Well.

Two letters.

It is gotta be AI.

Yes.

And to talk about AI就说到人工智能的话, of course, we need to talk about robots.

Yes.

机器人. I know a lot of you probably have trouble pronouncing that word, although it's very easy, but I've heard many mispronunciations.

So for American pronunciation, you would pronounce it Robot [?ro??bɑt], and British pronunciation?

We will say robot [?r??b?t].

Roughly the same.

Yeah, but it doesn't really matter, because it's not an English word anyway.

Oh. Is it not?

Nope. It actually comes from Czech.

就是捷克, 捷克语. Was it also robot in Czech?

In Czech, it’s - there's a word “robota”.

Robota, let me guess, this gotta be a word related to machine, automation, technological advances, all of those fancy things.

No, it means forced labor, slave or serf.

What?

That's what it means.

Okay. Forced labor, 强制劳动, slave奴隶

Yeah.

Serf我记得的话 s-e-r-f 对吧?

Yeah. That's right.

是农奴的意思.

Yeah. That's what it means.

By the way, what is the difference between a serf and a slave?

Well. Serfs were like slaves, as they were forced to stay on the land where they lived. But serfs were part of the land. If they were sold, it's normally with land.

And they had some rights.

Yeah, they have some very basic rights.

But they had to pay for every one of those rights, if I remembered correctly.

Pretty much, pretty much. So slaves were completely different because slaves could be sold individually. They could be sold between owners.

So if you think about it, serfs were like the add-on to buy land.

I see, but either way, that's not a good thing, serf…

No, no.

Being a serf sounds like…

It was not nice.

No. You're forced to work for very long hours for very little pay or no pay. But how is that related to robot?

Well, it actually comes from a play from the 1920s. So there was a Czech writer and he created a play and he was trying to find a word to describe mechanical men or the kind of machines that were like men.

Was it a sci-fi play?

Well. It was a little bit sci-fi, it was a little bit sci-fi. The play itself is not very important because I don't think it's very popular.

Very popular.

It was very popular. But if you think about before then we would just call them mechanical men, so pretty much the same as the Chinese words.

机器人, mechanical men.

But because of this play, we just took the word robot.

I see, actually come to think of it. If you are thinking about it from a robot perspective.

Yeah.

It is like serfdom, it is like forced labor, although as we like human beings, we think of them as we can use them to perform different tasks, but for them, they have no rights.

Exactly.

Maybe back then they were already thinking about AI rising, AI uprising?

Probably. I think it was the play itself was a bit of a social commentary about kind of technology, industry, etc., etc. So it's probably kind of where the idea comes from.

Yeah.

And if you think about so many films nowadays, so much you read in the news about kind of how AI is going to destroy us and how robots are gonna destroy the world. I think we've always had that fear.

Think about “Westworld”. You watched “Westworld”, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

That is, although it's not in a horror genre, but it really terrifies me.

Yeah.

Because think about all these cruelty that they suffered at the hands of men.

Mhm.

Because men thought they don't have sentience, they don't have feelings or emotions, but it turns out they do.

Exactly.

I would say that's something that does come up quite a lot in literature. If you think as we talk about in one of our albums, we talk about Frankenstein, the whole idea of us going a bit too far and taking the role of essentially God.

Yeah, but then again, like all slaves in history or slavery in history, there will be one day where slaves or serfs, they're gonna go through an uprising and they're gonna overthrow their “owners” and oppressors.

I know my luck. I'll probably end up the slaves of the robot.

Actually, that is the question that I'm going to ask as we're approaching the end of this episode. In an AI awakening, uprising, 如果说真的是AI觉醒, 就这些机器人都有了sentience有了知觉的话, 有了感觉的话, and they start to, let's say, overthrow human authority. Would you be like caving in and saying “Oh, yeah. I bow down to the AI overlord.” Or are you gonna be like “No, man versus machine gonna fight to the very end”?

No. I'll cave in.

That’s just easier that way.

It's just easier. You know. I've seen kind of ChatGPT and it knows a lot more than I do. So it's probably for the best.

Do you know the scary thing is not only does AI know more than you do, it also knows more than you will ever know.

Exactly. So what's the point in fighting? Just give up.

Alright, as we're approaching the end of today's show. Leave us a comment in the comment section, tell us what kind of words you would like for us to talk about, what kind of interesting origin stories that you want to hear, and also what would you do in –

In the great robot uprising.

Exactly. Thank you安澜 for coming to the show.

Thanks, Lulu. Thanks, everyone.

We'll see you in the next episode.

Bye.

Bye.