Initially, this fascination was expressed by directly trying to create life while circumventing the human reproductive cycle. In Greek mythology, there is the story of Pygmalion, a king of Cyprus, and a celebrated sculptor. Disgusted with what he saw as the debauchery of women, Pygmalion swore off women for all time. To assuage his loneliness, he sculpted the likeness of a woman, and lavished his affection on it. Eventually, he fell in love with the statue, and prayed to Aphrodite (the goddess of love) to bring it to life. Aphrodite changed the statue to a living woman, whom Pygmalion named Galatea and then married.
In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, several well-known rabbis and Judaic scholars began telling stories about the Golem. There are many different versions of how the Golem was brought to life, but all have two things in common. First, the Golem is always a human-like automaton crafted from sand and mud. Second, the Golem can only be brought to life with the intervention of God, implying that man was simply not meant to create life on his own. The Golem was always created to defend life, but is in the end destroyed by its creator, who fears that it may grow to have a will of its own, and thus be uncontrollable.
In 1818, Mary Shelly wrote her now immortal novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. In that story, the Swiss scientist Frankenstein constructs a creature out of pieces of dead human bodies. This story is unique, in that it introduces the concept of using electricity to give life to the automaton, as Frankenstein harnesses the power of lightning to bring his creature to life.
Eventually, mankind’s fascination with the idea of directly creating life dwindled. It turned instead to
the creation of life through
purely artificial means, without flesh and blood.This new fascination reached a turning point in 1921 when Karel Capek wrote a play named R.U.R., in which the term “robot” first appeared and was applied to an intelligent artificially created person. Since then, the term “robot” has caught on, been applied to any intelligent machine, and robots have spread into every aspect of modern life. Very few people today are unable to give an example of a robot when asked.
The purpose of this study is to briefly examine the history and evolution of robots, to consider the future of robots, and to answer the question: “Do humans create robots to help them, or to replace them?”