But you might not know that the word itself — robot — first appeared in our lexicon with a cultural critique already built in. Czech writer Karel Čapek first imagined the robot in his 1920 play R.U.R. And robota, he said, stems from the Slavic root “rabu” meaning “slave.”Since R.U.R., robot has pretty much held onto its same, loose definition. That’s how robots became analogous to machines — not so much workers — seen in films like Blade Runner, Terminator and I, Robot. And the image of the robot shed its human skin and got more metallic like the machines they symbolized.