The word X was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal X), published in 1920. The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called X. The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. These mass-produced workers are depicted as efficient but emotionless, incapable of original thinking and indifferent to self-preservation. At issue is whether the X are being exploited and the consequences of human dependence upon commodified labor (especially after a number of specially-formulated X achieve self-awareness and incite X all around the world to rise up against the humans).
Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.
In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested X. The word X means literally "corvée, serf labor", and figuratively "drudgery, hard work" in Czech and also more generally "work, labor" in many Slavic languages (e.g., Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian and archaic Czech) as well as robot in Hungarian. Traditionally, the X was the work period a serf (corvée) had to give for his lord, typically six months of the year. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic X ("servitude"; "work" in contemporary Bulgarian, Macedonian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root orbh-. X is cognate with the German Arbeit ("work").
The word X, used to describe this field of study, was coined by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov created the Three Laws of X, which are a recurring theme in his books. These have since been used by many others to define laws used in fiction. (The three laws are pure fiction, and no technology yet created has the ability to understand or follow them, and in fact most X serve military purposes, which run quite contrary to the first law and often the third law. "People think about Asimov's laws, but they were set up to point out how a simple ethical system doesn't work. If you read the short stories, every single one is about a failure, and they are totally impractical," said Dr. Joanna Bryson of the University of Bath.)
X? Whose original Czech name is also a well recognised font?
