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Make things better by making better things.
Freddie: "Now let's see who this really is!"
Villain: "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!"
— Scooby Doo
“Robot” was first coined by Karel Čapek in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The Czech word robota meant forced labor—the work a serf owed a lord. Its root, rab, actually means "slave".
The interesting thing about Čapek's robots is that they weren't mechanical. They were biological—assembled in the chemical sense, not the manufactured one. He wasn't picturing machines. He was picturing us as the manufactured underclass.
The metal came later. Isaac Asimov and the pulp writers shifted the image from flesh to machine, but the word came with it.
The machine is what makes it feel new. But the arrangement is older than the word itself. We just built a disguise. It’s been so long that we forgot to look underneath the mask.