Talos was the mythological mechanical guardian of the island of Crete, provided by the god Haephaestus. It was perhaps the earliest of mankind's attempts to envision machines with human capabilities. Robot is a much later term derived from robota, the Czech word for "work" with the implication of forced labor, first appearing in the play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Capek in 1921. Our term Cybernetics is directly derived from the Greek word kybernetes, which means "helsman", in the sense of being self-steering as we are; interestingly enough the academic discipline itself is far more concerned with information than machinery, and actually predated the first binary computers by about a decade.
For the purposes of this humble blog, however, we are solely interested in standalone devices which to a greater or lesser degree attempt to achieve the functionality of the human as Talos did. Due to the many changes in our view of both cognition and corporation, we cannot truly say modern "robots" are the direct children of Talos, but they are surely his stepchildren. Here we will keep track of their inexorable interweaving within the social superbody of humanity in the 21st century.
(Images courtesy of Wikipedia and Professor Dennis G Jerz.)
