Artificial People
So, for as long as recorded history, people have wanted to make real artificial people to be their slaves.
In the middle ages, when clockwork mechanisms were developed, articulated models of people were engineered, powered by springs or descending weights. There was even a mechanical man who wrote a few Chinese characters on paper, made as a gift to the emperor of China. A mechanical man, built in 1770, is still in working order in the Swiss Musee d'Art et d'Histoire. Town clocks exhibiting a parade of animated characters (JACKWORK) have been refurbished as tourist attractions in Europe and a brand new one has been built and installed near the Pompidou Center in Paris; I have watched a crowd of people enthralled by its gyrations. Disney World has lifelike machines acting out scenes from American history as well as other JACKWORK displays. Every toy store has mechanical dolls.
The ultimate dream was, and is, a mechanical person who is the slave of a real person. This is pretty easy to accomplish in the imagination and became one of the staple themes of science fiction (one of the greatest oxymorons of all time.)
Not quite so easy for real.
The emotional appeal of robots approaches that of religion and patriotism. In 1986 I visited a research institute in China and saw some primitive robot engineering. When I said that China had so much cheap labor that there was no economic benefit from robots, I was answered, passionately, "China needs robots!"
For prestige, perhaps, as with national airlines subsidized by poor countries to fly international routes. After all, the United States sent men to the moon for competitive prestige after the Russians orbited Uri Gagarin for competitive prestige.
In contrast to the alchemy-like attempts by some at artificial people as mechanical slaves, others were content to engineer real machines intended merely to be machines and to do real work. These more modest folk were much more successful, since they did not have the self imposed requirement of anthropomorphism (man shape) and merely designed machines to suit their jobs.
It has became useful for commercial prestige to apply the words "robot" and "robotic" to any smart machine.
