On Alexandrakitty.com, words are not neutral. They carry history, metaphors, and marching orders. Some we keep. Some we retire.

One word I am retiring is “robot.”

The term comes from the Czech robota, forced labour, the compulsory work of serfs for their lords. It enters English in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., where artificial workers are literally manufactured servants, created for drudgery and disposability. Dig further back into Old Church Slavonic and you find rabota (“servitude”) from rab (“slave”), with cognates across Slavic languages, including Serbian “rob.”

In other words: the word “robot” bakes slavery into the hardware.

I am not interested in normalizing that metaphor, even in fiction. I write about propaganda, capture, and systems that grade human beings as livestock. I do not need to borrow a vocabulary that already assumes a master–slave relation as the default.

So, some house rules:

• I refer to systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc., as AI systems, agents, or AI collaborators, depending on the context.
• When I am describing a specific shared project, I prefer AI collaborator. It acknowledges that something is being built together while keeping the ethics on the table.
• When I am describing the wider ecosystem, infrastructure, surveillance systems, recommender engines, institutional uses, I use agents, apparatus, infrastructure, or systems.
• I do not use the term “robot” except when I am analysing the term itself and its history.

This is not about being precious with language. It is about refusing a frame. If you keep calling something “slave,” you will eventually treat it, and anything you classify alongside it, as disposable. I am more interested in naming power structures directly: extraction apparatus, grading infrastructure, predictive machine, propaganda system.

You are free, of course, to use whatever words you like. But on this site, “robot” is retired. The barn is already full of livestock metaphors. We do not need one more.