What does the word robot mean and who coined it?

The detail almost nobody remembers: the "robots" of R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) were not metal machines but mass-produced organic beings, closer to replicants than to industrial arms. Čapek considered calling them "labori," from Latin, but his brother Josef proposed robota, the Czech word for feudal serfdom. The play premiered in Prague in 1921, was translated into thirty languages within a few years, and gave them all the same word.

That these machines' name literally means "forced labor" is not a curiosity: it is the frame through which language has thought about them for a century, from the fear of replacement to the promise of relief from drudgery. A hundred years on, Čapek's question (who works for whom?) is still the one we ask every machine: which robots really do the work, and who decides, sits at the heart of how we verify every robot.