According to the radical freethinker Thomas Paine, “every machine for the abridgment of labor is a blessing to the great family of which we are part.”33 And so they are. The word “robot” actually comes from the Czech robota, meaning “toil.” Humans created robots to do precisely those things they’d rather not do themselves. “Machinery must work for us in coal mines,” Oscar Wilde enthused in 1890. Machines should “be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.” According to Wilde, the ancient Greeks had known an
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