Ancient robotic 🤖 history

The Power Couple

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Ancient robotic 🤖 history

Revised episode: Ancient Origins | Modern Trends

Roman S Shapoval and Bohdanna Diduch

Aug 16, 2025

Dear Listeners,

We apologize for the glitch in yesterday’s episode, which began with 40 seconds of robotic silence! 😭

Here’s the episode again. We hope you enjoy it!

…just don’t let Alexa know you’re talking about her.

Egyptian water clock, da Vinci's robot knight, robodog with machine gun

Are robots going to make our lives easier, or more convenient for someone else’s agenda of profit and control?

Here are some current global trends1 in robotics:

There are over 3.4 million industrial robots in the world today
Industrial companies plan to invest 25% of their capital in industrial automation over the next five years
14% of workers have lost their jobs to robots

From Rosie the Robot to Robocop, past generations have been programmed to think robots will be a boon to society. The original robots were meant to do the mundane, and support civil society.

Issac Asimov, who coined the word “robotics” generally characterized the robots in his short stories as helpful servants of man, and proposed three "Laws of Robotics" that his robots, as well as sci-fi robotic characters of many other stories, followed:

Law 1 - A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Law 2 - A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Law 3 - A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Today we are breaking all of those laws, with robots that serve the military police-surveillance state, as robo-vacuum cleaners and gadgets become harvested data points, eventually used against our best interest. How do we build servants, rather than become slaves of a master robot race we ourselves have created?

Join us as we discuss:

The history of robotics
Robots in pop culture
Economic impacts of robotics
Robots and the future of our humanity

“When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born, and in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,

And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.”

~ Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

We are more powerful than we know,