robot

• Young Rossum invented a worker with a minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work—everything that makes man more expensive. In fact, he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are, they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.c. 1921 (date written), Karel Čapek, translated by Paul Selver, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama […], Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1923, →OCLC, Act I, page 17:
• The robots in Dick's novel, loosely adapted by Ridley Scott into the film Blade Runner, were so similar to humans that when they went rogue, trained bounty hunters were called in to perform psychological tests to see whether suspected androids lacked human empathy.2010 January 26, Tom Chivers, Iain McDiarmid, The Telegraph:

• We have a robot in the house that does the vacuuming.
• It's painfully slow and complex work which has never been attempted before in these conditions: the small box-shaped robots, equipped with two claws, are operating in almost freezing water 5,000ft below the surface, in pitch black and strong currents.2010 May 16, Tim Webb, “BP fights to stop the Gulf of Mexico spill – and salvage its reputation”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 09 Jun 2021:

• Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans.2025 July 2, Lisa Bonos, Danielle Abril, “No one likes meetings. They’re sending their AI note takers instead.”, in The Washington Post, →ISSN, archived from the original on 02 Jul 2025:

• Straight society tries to change us by several means. Most of the time, it is mental torture, though physical abuse is not uncommon. We are programmed to be straight starting from the day we are born, and every action, word, and feeling must conform to the straight image. If we DO decide to be free rather than to be robots, here are some of the consequences.1973 December 22, Satya, “It Is Not We Who Must Change”, in Gay Community News, volume 1, number 27, page 3:
• Yet surely he was a humorless robot of a man, spewing forth lonely and bitter critiques of all those lesser mortals with whom he could not identify.2006, Murray N. Rothbard, Making Economic Sense, page xiv:

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• One anonymous message addressed to "fellow robots" hoped readers would have "an enjoyable Elliot Rodger day"—a reference to the shooter who killed six near a Santa Barbara university last year.2015 October 1, David Kravets, “Ominous messages left on 4chan day before Oregon college killings [Updated]”, in Ars Technica, archived from the original on 06 Dec 2022:
• Posters on the board are locked in an ongoing debate about who can be one of them— a "robot." Can white guys be robots, despite their privilege? Can black guys? Women love them! It goes on and on. Only one rule really seems to be agreed upon: "If you have no friends and no gf you are a robot."2015 October 3, Jay Hathaway, “How 4chan Trolled Two of Its Friends by Framing Them for the Oregon Mass Shooting”, in Gawker, archived from the original on 20 Nov 2022: