How Robotic Arms Defined the Industrial Revolution
]A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
In the nearly 100 years since Czech playwright Karel Čapek borrowed the phrase “robot” from his brother Josef and introduced it to the lexicon, the relationship between man and machine has become endlessly complex and world-defining. Robotic limbs are a particularly great example of this.
Most of our modern innovations have been shaped by the fact that, nearly 60 years ago,